Reviews, discussion and news about crime fiction. Occasional forays into books in other areas, publishing, science, the web and more.

Book review

06 December 2010

The fourteenth of these annual collections of short stories first published in the previous calendar year arrived courtesy of the publisher, Corvus (Atlantic). Although I am not usually a consumer of the short-story format, I had just read a novel that upset me so much that I needed an antidote before embarking on another one, so a few short stories seemed to be just the ticket.

Each year, Otto Penzler reads all the submitted entries (more than 1,000 for this collection) – the rules are explained in his series forward. He makes a shortlist of 50 and a guest editor (this year the ubiquitous Lee Child) makes the final choice of 20. I had read four of the authors in the 2010 book before: Dennis Lehane, Jay Brandon, Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Margolin. All provide well-observed, twisty tales that I enjoyed reading. Margolin’s, in particular, manages to be both funny and sharp. Of the authors new to me, I liked the entries by Doug Allyn and Phylis Cohen – but there are plenty of others to attract your interest, ranging across place and time.

I am never sure how to review a short story because even a sentence can give away too much of the plot for a short-form piece. However, real-estate brokers, barmen, female vice cops, jewellery thieves and lawyers in the wild west all feature in a well-put-together set of stories.

At the end of the book there is a brief biography of each author, together with a short paragraph about how he or she came to write the story in the collection. I’m not sure for how long many of these will stick in my memory, but dipping in and out of this book was a pleasant experience, and on occasion a haunting one.

25 November 2010

This novel is one of the saddest books I have ever read. It’s a superbly told story of village life in Botswana. The first chilling chapters are from the point of view of Mr Disanka, a successful businessman at the village level. He has a wife and several children to whom he is outwardly devoted (so much so in the case of his youngest child that she’s obese from all the sweets, ice-cream and other “treats” she demands and receives), he has a mistress who has all the same things as his wife but not quite as good, and he has various liaisons. None of this is sufficient to satisfy a very dark desire, however. He plans how to achieve his malign goal with two other local “dignitaries”.

After this mesmerising, and menacing, start to the novel, the reader is plunged into life in this country of ignorance, poverty, superstition and extreme sexism. Attitudes to women and to the poor are deeply ingrained and maintained by long traditions, supported by those themselves who suffer. The police, as well as other low-level “government officials” in their cosy jobs for life, keep everything under control and make sure any benefits are kept among themselves. The country is going through a period of positive change, typified by occasional poor children being able to attend school, and the odd inside toilet (greeted with derision for, from their perspective, very practical reasons by most of the villagers).

Five years after the start of the novel, a young woman called Amantle Bokaa takes up an internship at a remote health centre. As she begins her duties assigned to her by the lazy, unpleasant nurses who run the centre, we read of her life-story. She’s the seventh child of a typical poor peasant family, the first sibling to be able to go to school, and wants to be a doctor. She’s a determined, brave woman who uncomplainingly accepts the menial jobs meted out to her by the nurses despite the fact she’d clearly be better both with the patients and in diagnosing their illnesses. One of her tasks is to clear out a storeroom, and there she discovers a box inscribed with the name “Neo Kakang”, containing some bloody clothes. Amantle remembers that this is the name of a girl who went missing, presumed killed by an animal or drowned, five years previously.

The rest of the novel describes what Amantle does about her discovery, involving a lawyer friend whom she’s met previously when unfairly accused of inciting a student riot. In the process, the reader learns many details of the entrenched culture of poverty and repression; and the lazy, smug attitudes of the (mainly male) people who have been lucky enough to be assigned government jobs. These details are seamlessly woven into the narrative, and add a tremendous power and authenticity to the novel. One of the many aspects that I loved was the positive portrayal of young, professional women (and the occasional young man) who, helped by education, are rising above the history and traditions of their tribal, superstition-ridden society to strike out for independence and freedom of choice. The story is, however, unbearably tragic– the last chapter (which explains the title) is so terribly, pathetically upsetting that I could hardly bear to read it.

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The author, Unity Dow, has been a prominent human rights activist and is Botswana’s first female high-court judge. This novel is a must-read, if you can bear it. It is an admirable book, and provides a searing perspective and portrait of life in a region whose impact and depth could never be matched by authors from elsewhere who try to reflect similar realities from the outside.

"The Screaming of the Innocent (2002), Dow's second novel, is based on a real case of a ritual killing of a child, a practice that has its roots in traditional initiation ceremonies. It is a compelling account not just of how a belief in the supernatural still exists in a society that has adopted many Western beliefs and practices, but also of how powerful figures in a small town – the village head, a school principal and a successful businessmen – can force their will on ordinary people and manipulate the local representatives of government. The novel vividly portrays multi-partner relationships, which have their roots in traditional attitudes to male-female relations and sexuality. The supernatural world again plays an ambiguous role, at worst allowing individuals to escape responsibility for their own actions. "Someone else is doing things to you," said Dow. "You might drink too much, have a car crash, and then blame witchcraft. This really becomes a problem when it's applied to AIDS." "

The best of times, the worst of times. Edition 17: Staying Alive by Peter Browne

21 November 2010

Hidden Depths is a classic crime-fiction story set in the small towns and villages of Northumberland (and, a bit, in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), north-east England. Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team are called out when a young teenager, Luke Armstrong, is found dead in his bath by his mother, Julie. Julie at first assumes the boy, who had learning difficulties, had committed suicide, but Vera and team quickly establish that he had been murdered. Soon after, the body of another young person, this time a woman called Lily Marsh, is found on the beach, having died in a similar fashion to Luke. Again, Vera’s team investigates.

The former case, that of Luke, has proved hard to tackle for the police due to a dearth of suspects, though Vera quickly picks up on the fact that Luke’s best friend Tom had drowned some time ago, and that although the death was accidental, Luke tried to save Tom and has since blamed himself for his friend’s death. Tom comes from a family of criminals, so Vera visits his father in prison and uncovers a couple of clues, or rather hints.

The second case, that of Lily, presents a richer crew of suspects. Lily is discovered by four men who are celebrating the sixtieth birthday of one of them, unpleasant Peter Calvert, a botanist. Calvert, in common with Cleeves characters in other novels, is both an obsessive birdwatcher and a failed yet pompous academic. Although he is a university lecturer, he has not reached what he considers to be his full potential, and has to suffer the indignity of having research papers rejected from journals, and so on. His smug wife Felicity is much younger than him. She does not work outside the home, spending her time looking after the couple’s youngest child James, cooking and keeping the house and garden beautiful. She enjoys flirting with her husband’s birdwatching friends Gary, a sound technician, Sam, a librarian and writer, and Clive, a museum curator.

Vera and her team search for a link between the two cases. Soon they find that they have almost too many connections, as more characters turn up who have or could have intersected with both victims. The charm and heart of this novel is the personality of Vera. She’s much more central here than she was in Telling Tales, her previous outing, so we learn a bit more about her background and relationship with her father, as well as her investigative methods and attitudes, and her relationship with younger policeman Joe Ashworth. Vera is not the kind of detective, nor Cleeves the kind of author, who is big on procedure and documentation. Rather, Vera goes to see all the characters in turn, gradually digging under their defences and working out how their past or present secrets might be relevant. Whether or not this approach is a realistic depiction of police-work, the result is a compelling, sympathetic and insightful account of the quietly desperate lives led by some people, on the edge of mental illness in some cases, and how they struggle to keep going in a hostile or indifferent world. The character studies here are acute, and while there are so many clues and connections that the solution to the mysteries does have an element of “select any person out of the list of suspects” about it, the novel as a whole is readable, absorbing and enjoyable.

My copy of this book was a gift from the publisher.

There are three books in the Vera Stanhope series: The Crow Trap, Telling Tales and Hidden Depths (links go to my reviews). The next installment, Silent Voices, is out in the UK early next year. Vera will also be a TV characterearly next year (UK), in which Hidden Depths is currently planned to be the first episode even though it is the third in the book series.

20 November 2010

How does one write an original thriller in the crowded niche of books about terrorists/hostages? If the author had not been Stephen White, I would not have picked up this book on the grounds that such plots are usually 100 per cent predictable, with the only variations being location, cause of terrorism, etc. Nevertheless, Stephen White is a reliable author, and after completing The Siege I think it fair to say that if you like his Alan Gregory novels, you’ll probably like this one, which although it features series regular Sam Purdy, a Boulder cop currently under suspension, can be read without any reference to the rest of the author’s output.

The Siege does not start promisingly, with a confusing opening chapter that plunges us into the main action, told from the point of view of New Haven cop Sergeant Christine Carmody as she is dealing with an act of violence against a hostage being held in a ‘tomb’ at Yale University. After this horrible yet confusingly described event, the author steps back to relate the story of the previous few days that led up to the crisis. Some of this build-up concerns the aforementioned Sam, who is attending an upmarket engagement party in Florida. He has been invited because his soon-to-be stepdaughter is marrying the son of the squillionaire Ronaldo Calderon and his geophysicist wife Ann. Knowing Sam is in law enforcement, Ann reveals to him that her daughter Jane, a student at Yale, has suddenly stopped communicating with her, and that she’s very worried as the two are usually in constant contact. She asks him for discreet help. Rapidly, Sam surmises that the reason for Jane’s silence is a dreadful one.

Chapters switch between Sam’s quest to find out more about what has happened to Jane, and Christine’s cop duties in New Haven. Luckily, Christine has a boss who is not very bright, so between explanations to him and Sam (who soon arrives at the location) scouting around, the reader is given a quick tutorial on Yale tombs (actually large, stone buildings), secret student societies (reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s novel A Secret History), “tapping” and so on, as well as a useful street map, so one can become geographically orientated about the act(s) of terrorism and other dramatic events in the immediate area.

A third story is being told in parallel – that of an odd couple of investigators, a female CIA agent called Dee, and her occasional male lover, FBI counter-intelligence specialist Poe. Poe is a victim of the Oklahoma bomb atrocity and has never really recovered. He and Dee between them are interested in “evolved terrorism” – where terrorism might go if it stopped being the provenance of fanatics and began to be financed by high-tech big business. They, too, home in on New Haven as soon as they hear news of the hostage crisis.

The Siege is very involving and exciting during the chapters about Sam, Christine, Dee and Poe, as they try to fulfil their various missions with honour and courage, as well as racing against time to second-guess (and hence try to foil) the terrorists. Where the novel falls down is in exactly in the usual failing of “terrorist-hostage” novels: that is, the terrorists are far too all-seeing, all-powerful, able to anticipate any move by the authorities and technologically beyond mere sophistication. Their motivation, when finally revealed, is logical but not that credible, and for me does not fully hang together with their actions towards their student hostages. So, I score the novel 10 out of 10 for the "good guy" characters and the exciting, tense events as told from their perspectives as they converge on New Haven– I particularly liked the geophysical subplot – but far less than that for the routine terrorists and the action-packed (equally routine) outcome and aftermath.

I purchased my copy of this novel. Thanks to Kathy for reminding me the other day in a comment that this book was on my "to be purchased" list.

17 November 2010

Part police-procedural and part psychological suspense, The Burning is a very good crime novel. From the cover words, one would think that this book is about a serial killer who is attacking young women walking home late at night in south London, and burning them. Although this plot description would usually put me off reading a book, my experience of the author’s previous (debut) novel, The Missing, encouraged me to buy The Burning, and I’m glad I did as the serial killer element is very much a side-issue.

DC Maeve Kerrigan is part of the team working on the case of the murdered women. She’s called out at 3 a.m. one day when it is thought that the killer has been caught in the act. Simultaneously with the discovery that this is not true, the body of a young woman is found – presumed the fifth victim. Maeve and the head of the task force, DI Godley, have their doubts based on some differences in the fifth case from the previous four, so Maeve finds herself assigned to a 'sideline' investigation into the fifth murder. Godley wants to keep the possibility that there may be two killers within his squad and away from the media until he is sure one way or the other.

Maeve is a competent detective plagued by petty sexism and racism (she’s Irish) that never reaches the level of justifiying a complaint, but which is corrosive and unsettling for her. At the same time, she’s impulsively moved in two months earlier with Ian, a banker, and their relationship is not working out, to put it mildly.

Despite her personal insecurities, Maeve pursues her investigation into the “fifth” case with professional vigour, which involves investigating friends, family and ex-colleagues of the dead woman. Most of the book is told from her point of view, but the chapters in Maeve’s voice are interspersed with short entries by Louise, the dead girl’s best friend. By these means, we gradually build up a picture of the woman and her life, as Maeve closes in on what must have happened.

Matters come to a head one night when the police, including Maeve, take part in a large undercover operation. Maeve, with the help of her sympathetic colleague Rob and DI Godley, works out the truth by a combination of deductive reasoning and instinct – but of course, not before she herself is endangered.

This novel is both readable and impressive. Although its context is that of the search for the serial killer, the author is much more interested in the life of the fifth victim and how her death came about, so rather than dominating the novel with clichéd accounts of murders, the serial-killer case is tangential to the main event – constantly threatening and creating pressure on the police team, yet insubstantial rather than in the foreground. In my opinion, this makes the novel both stronger and distinctive. Although the solution to the “fifth” mystery is not much of a surprise, it certainly has impact, due to the reader’s involvement in the characters, particularly Maeve –a determined and attractive protagonist whom I hope to meet again one day.

15 November 2010

In the winter heat of Rio de Janeiro, a young homeless boy witnesses an insensible drunk being helped into a car outside a restaurant late at night. From his precious cardboard box, the boy watches as the man is wedged into his car by a woman and the restaurant’s doorman – tantalisingly, he sees a wallet sticking out of the drunk’s pocket. Unobserved in the chaos, he manages to snatch it. After the car drives off, he investigates his spoils but sees that the wallet contains a policeman’s ID. Terrified, the boy takes the cash and drops the wallet back in the gutter. He waits to see who will pick it up.

Later, retired cop Viera wakes up with a dreadful hangover and a severe memory lapse. Realizing his wallet has gone, he’s annoyed about the loss of his police ID card more than anything, as he’s been using it since he retired and can’t get another one. He vaguely remembers that he went out the previous evening with his girlfriend Magali. He assumes that she has dropped him home and gone back to her own flat, so goes there to ask if she has his wallet. She is out, so he leaves his card. After returning to his apartment the phone rings. It is Inspector Espinosa, who has been called out to the scene of a murder – Magali’s. Espinosa’s only lead is Viera’s card.

The first half of this novel is a totally absorbing story of Espinosa’s teasing out of events before and after the crime. He soon discovers the existence of the homeless boy, and manages to make brief contact with him via a “street teacher” Clodorado. The boy is terrified though, as life on the streets is cheap and he has every reason to believe he is in danger.

As in the first novel in which he appears, Espinosa spends much of this novel torn between two women, this time they are Flor, a prostitute who was Magali’s best friend and who takes up with Viera; and Kiki, a young artist who sells her paintings at a road junction and is a witness in the case. Espinosa’s musings over the two women are far less interesting than the case itself, which gradually unravels against a sympathetic and harrowing background of the many poor people struggling to survive in this huge city. About half way through the novel, Espinosa and Viera run out of leads, and for the rest of it, Espinosa is either searching for the same few people, or just missing them (this book was written at a time when communication was by answering machine not mobile phone), or pondering on the appeal of the two very different women characters. Perhaps I found this last aspect a little tiresome as Espinosa spent the previous novel, The Silence of the Rain, similarly torn between two women – neither of whom is mentioned here.

At the end, Espinosa does work out what is happening, but in a curiously detached way, separate from any organised investigation. There are various leads which are not followed up with any vigour, and the explanation, when it comes, is too full of supposition to be very satisfactory. Even so, the novel is an extremely atmospheric depiction of life in Rio de Janeiro which I very much enjoyed reading, despite its slight failings as a convincing crime novel. The perspective of the street people and of those struggling to escape the slums and shanty dwellings to make something of themselves are particularly moving. The translation seems sympathetic, but is in US, not English, English.

12 November 2010

The second of Ella Griffiths's two novels that were translated into English, The Water Widow, is another engaging, brisk-paced investigation for detective brothers Sergeant Rudolf and Detective Karsten Nilsen of the Oslo police. The brothers were first encountered by English readers in Murder on Page Three.

The main plot of the book concerns Rudolf Nilsen’s investigation of the death of a man who was last seen complaining of bad toothache. The man, Georg Brandt, is in his 50s and lives alone – it is his elderly mother who reports his absence to the police after he misses a couple of regular visits to the nursing home where she lives. Rudolf spends most of the weekend asking Brandt’s colleagues in the mens’ clothes shop where he worked if they have any idea where he is, and questioning Brandt’s neighbours and landlord. He gets nowhere, but on Monday morning a dentist returns from a trip away and discovers a body in the treatment chair at his surgery.

Rudolf is in his 50s himself, an overweight policeman who is conscious of his age, his inability to climb stairs without getting completely out of breath, and feels guilty for shamefully ignoring his long-suffering wife while he works constant overtime. He embarks on a diet and spends the entire book in a state of hunger. His younger brother Karsten is an alcoholic, having been abandoned by his long-term girlfriend Wendy. As the novel progresses, we realise there is a deeper side to Karsten, bought out by his unlikely partnership with a young rookie cop.

Aside from these personal factors, the novel is a crisp, well-observed investigation into the strange death of Brandt – the only real clue being that a couple of witnesses claim to have seen a person in full widow’s weeds leaving the dentist’s building in the relevant timeframe. By the classic methods of interviewing suspects, witnesses and following up all leads, Rudolf gradually realises that the crime must be connected to the drugs trade, and in particular a theft from a local hospital. The author is particularly strong on conveying the varied tragedies of drug addiction, which is not as embedded as in Sweden or Germany at that time (we are told) but increasingly has an iron grip on too many (mainly young) people.

The ending consists of too many events and hasty explanations, but as a whole the book is a classic police procedural, well-plotted and well-told. I liked in particular in the characters and relationships of the brothers, and the author’s acute observations of several of the sad, pleasant and distinctly unpleasant people they encounter. What is more, this novel (and its predecessor) stand the test of time extremely well.

When I posted my review of Murder on Page Three, the translator, J. Basil Cowlishaw, kindly left a comment. I reproduce part of it here as some fascinating background about the author. “It's years ago that I translated it [Murder on Page Three], along with The Water Widow and a handful of Ella Griffiths's short stories, one of which was adapted for television by Anglia. Ella was my first (but fortunately not my last) Norwegian girlfriend when I came here in May 1945 with the RAF during the Liberation. We lost touch in the intervening years, but someone gave her my name as a translator and we managed to get our act together and as a result she was published in the UK. She died about ten years ago.”

10 November 2010

Raid is a young, silent and mysterious enforcer who has been paid to accompany Nygren, an ill, ageing criminal recently released after a long jail sentence, on a journey round Finland. As the odd couple meet Nygren’s ex-associates, it seems that the old man is wreaking vengeance on those who have betrayed him by keeping money that they owe him for his pre-incarceration “investments” into their shady businesses. Raid is a man of few (or, in public, no) words, but his increasingly ruthless methods are effective at extracting what is owed to Nygren even in spots so tight that there is no obvious exit. (Raid is a tad too superhuman for my taste, but even so he’s easy to like.)

Gradually, it is apparent that Nygren’s journey is more elegiac than it seemed at first. Some of the people he visits are people he himself has betrayed; others are lost family members. As Raid drives up and down the country, Nygren tells him stories of his past, and how he has come to this point – and eventually, we come to see why Nygren has chosen this particular companion.

Interspersed with this story is that of some Helsinki police detectives, primarily Detective Janssen, an overweight, balding mid-50s cop who to his disgruntlement has been sent to a health farm for a couple of weeks to get fit. Although he’s been married for many years and has never been unfaithful to his wife (an absent but strong influence on him in this novel), he’s tempted to stray by his easygoing colleague Huusko and, in a different way, by Anna, one of the physical therapists. Soon, his colleagues back at the station contact him about Nygren’s activities, as Janssen has had previous dealings with both him and his mysterious companion Raid. Why is Kempas, the head of the undercover unit, an obsessed workaholic, so determined to find Nygren guilty of something? Unwilling to be pulled into what seems like a witch-hunt, Janssen decides to abscond from his ordeal by health and find out for himself what is going on, with the help of his previous relationship with Raid.

I very much enjoyed this book, which is an unusual mix of themes – police-procedural, epic journey, “mysterious hard man”, and ironic humour. By following Nygren and Raid’s journey, and Janssen’s low-key pursuit, the reader can experience quite a few Finnish locations and life – and appreciate the national sport of cracking jokes at the expense of the Swedes. I did not much like the violent coda to the novel - my favourite parts were about Janssen and his colleagues, whom I hope to encounter again.

The Raid series is very popular in Finland and has also been filmed. According to the bibliography in this novel, the first Raid book was published in 1992 and there have been at least seven in the series since – this one is somewhere in the middle. (There may be more, but as the bibliography is in Finnish, I am assuming that only titles containing the word “Raid” are relevant.) It is great that Ice Cold Crime is translating this series (as well as books by other Finnish authors) for the US market and that this novel is available in Kindle format for UK readers.

08 November 2010

Matt Selekis is a doctor at a large hospital in Salt Lake City. He specialises in endocrine and oncological surgery, and is something of a (lower case s) saint, having spent some years working in Eritrea after graduating from medical school, before returning home. One night, a terminally ill, elderly patient begs Matt to end his pain, and Matt obliges –without alerting the on-call oncologist first because Matt knows the man will be drunk. Despite having been asked earlier by the patient, Mr Zoy, and his wife, to undertake this course if Mr Zoy’s suffering became too great to bear, Matt finds himself and his hospital subject to an ethical lawsuit.

Matt has a self-questioning nature, and reacts to these events by losing much of his fragile self-confidence. He’s always been an outsider from the hospital’s medical establishment, disapproving of the money it makes from performing (as Matt sees it) unnecessary weight-loss surgeries, and in addition he is not one of the LDS (Latter Day Saints with a capital S) who are dominant in this city. Nevertheless he is blissfully happily married to Denise, and they have a young son. Both Matt and Denise have elderly fathers: Clem, Denise’s father, has been a leading LDS figure, now in a self-chosen nursing facility and in Matt’s view dominating his daughter (who has left the Mormon church); Hirsh, Matt’s father, lives in what was the family’s vacation house in the wilds of the Rockies. Matt and Denise visit their respective fathers often.

Elizabeth (formerly Liz) Rigbey is masterful at conveying slow menace. Someone is following Matt in a red car: he is convinced it is the Zoys’ son, but never sees him through the darkened windows of his car so cannot know for sure. The book is told from the point of view of Matt, who is clearly an unreliable narrator as he tries to remember key events from his childhood summers in the holiday house. His mother Hilly was a concert pianist who has died of cancer many years previously, but Matt has many conflicting memories about her last summer and in particular his family’s relationship with their neighbours, the Minellis. Mr Minelli, a real-estate agent, was a bully but seemed to have a hold over Hilly. He died from gunshot wounds, but who was responsible? Matt was best friends with Minelli’s youngest son, Steve, but has not seen him for 26 years since that last summer in the mountains when the tragedy occurred. In the wake of the Zoys’ accusations, Steve suddenly re-enters Matt’s life, both at work and as a photographer of unsettling and questionable art. Steve is obsessed with his father’s death and persists in asking Matt to find out more from his own father, Hirsch. Matt and his father have a pretty silent relationship (Hirsch was a doctor and Matt has followed in his footsteps), and Matt is reluctant to confront the older man.

As well as all this ancient history, Matt himself seems to have secrets related to Denise, his wife’s, first marriage. How did Weslake, her first husband, die, and why is he a constant presence in Matt’s marriage? How is his business – selling a presumed fake slimming mixture – tied up with Matt’s family life and Denise’s father? Did Matt know Denise or Weslake while Weslake was alive?

The last part of this book is about a highly symbolic hunting trip that Matt and Hirsch undertake, in which it seems that many of these secrets may be revealed. That is, if the wild elements do not first defeat the pair, as Hirsch is pretty old and Matt inexperienced at wilderness survival.

There are many aspects of The Hunting Season that are extremely good. It’s a very well written book and particularly strong on the location both in Salt Lake City and in the surrounding mountains. The hospital, Matt’s friends, the LDS and its role in society, and the old locals who live near Hirsch are all portrayed with conviction. The plot is too drawn-out for my taste: the book is 500 pages long and I think that the air of creepy menace and false memories that provide the suspense can’t quite justify that length. Denise, Matt’s wife, is something of an insubstantial yet idealised figure, and though Hilly comes across in sharp relief (though she is only present in the novel in half-glimpsed fragments), Hirsch is slightly unconvincing as he switches from being a universally respected retired family doctor to insisting on an extremely demanding, survivalist and dangerous journey with his son, which seems out of character. The Hunting Season is a very absorbing read about a likeable if rather incurious protagonist (he never looks anything up to answer his doubts and insecurities). By the end of the novel, several mysteries are solved, but one is left slightly in the air, wondering how things will turn out for the characters after the last page has been turned. I'm very glad I read this book, and if the author writes another one (I hope she will), I shall certainly read it.

When she was still called Liz Rigbey, this author wrote an original and distinctive debut called Total Eclipse, about an astronomer. If you can get hold of it, I highly recommend it as one of the novels I’ve read that really stands out in my mind. Her second novel, Summertime, is very good but like The Hunting Season, does not quite match the first. All three books are very well written indeed, with a haunting, involving quality that really conveys what it is like under the skin of some of the characters.

06 November 2010

A Capital Crime is a great piece of storytelling. I am glad of my policy of knowing nothing about the content of books before I read them, as had I known that this novel is based on a famous real-life crime, I might not have embarked on it. And I would have missed out.

It is 1950, six years since the traumatic events in DI Stratton’s life that happened at the end of An Empty Death. Stratton and his trusty sergeant Ballard are contacted by the Welsh police because a man has confessed to them that he’s murdered his wife at their previous house, in London. Upon investigation, it turns out that not only has this 19-year-old, pregnant woman disappeared, but so has her 14-month-old baby. Soon, the worst is discovered, and Stratton has to relive personal traumas while managing this case. A man is sent for trial, and the case seems cut and dried.

The main strength of this novel is the author’s sheer storytelling ability. Having established the crime plot, she turns away from that and to the character of Diana Calthrop, from the first novel in this series (Stratton’s War). Diana is soon to be divorced from her weak husband, and intends to make a new life for herself in London. This she does, very capably, soon landing a job at a film studio as assistant to a director. While she is there, she meets Monica, Stratton’s daughter, who is a make-up artist and who is also a major character in this novel. Monica, like her father, is very conscious of the class divide between her and Diana, but again like her father, is attracted to her. Diana, however, with her unerring instinct for disaster, embarks on a course that will bring her into a very different life to the one with which she’s familiar. There is a contemporary resonance to the knife-edge on which Diana lives, and her story is told with real passion and depth.

A few years pass. Stratton and his colleagues hear of one or two disappearances of prostitutes, but cannot make any headway in finding them. Suddenly, a terrible discovery is made, and the policemen are presented with the worst, most upsetting case they’ve ever seen in their careers – careers that have seen plenty of horrors while serving in London during the recently ended Second World War.

Stratton is an attractive, introspective character, conscious of his weaknesses and uncomfortably aware of his inability to communicate fully with Monica and his belligerent son Pete, now doing his National Service. He’s hampered by the conventions of the day, yet sensitive in a way that many of his contemporaries are not. A chance meeting with Diana at the Festival of Britain sends him into a confused state, yet this experience is nothing compared with the circumstances when they next meet.

The middle section of this novel was a compulsive page-turner for me, reading about Diana’s life and about the people she knew while working for the secret service in the War. I was intrigued by Monica and the setting of the film studio. The last part of the book focuses more on the awful crime case, from the point of view of the police investigation. I found this less interesting than the interpersonal stories of the Strattons and their family and friends, together with Diana’s circle. Perhaps that is because I find the true-life case on which this novel is based both repellent and tedious.

Laura Wilson has written an excellent novel in A Capital Crime. Her invented characters, whether central or tangential, are completely realistic and of their time yet with a subtle overtone of present-day perspective. Her observations of the social mores of the day are acute, and her cast-list (with the exception of the criminal) sympathetic yet unsentimental. Her settings are beautifully detailed and convincing throughout. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and so much hope that it will not be too long before the next episode in the life of DI Ted Stratton.

I am very grateful to the publisher, Quercus, for my copy of this book.

04 November 2010

Ash Levine quit the LAPD in a mixture of guilt and anger when a witness to a crime he was investigating was shot and killed. He’s very much at loose ends, though, stifled by his family and not enjoying the prospect of law school. He therefore jumps at the chance offered to him by his old mentor, Lieutenant Duffy, to return to the squad to investigate the shooting of a retired cop, Pete Revitch. Levine is full of energy and soon finds some leads which he pursues with vigour, while at the same time suffering some slings and arrows from old colleagues and superiors who are less than pleased that he’s back on the force.

Told in the first person, Kind of Blue (from the Miles Davis track) is a detailed yet fast-paced and absorbing police procedural with plenty of clues and leads to keep the reader on her toes. The author has previously written two non-fiction books about the LAPD, one as a result of shadowing two detectives for some months, and this deep and detailed knowledge is evident in every paragraph of this novel. The author does not fall into the trap of providing too much information, though. Levine is a man with a mission, and single-mindedly pursues the righteous way of investigation, not diverted by the politics of modern policing. At the same time, he has a somewhat troubled personal life: he’s divorced, a veteran of the Israeli army, and suffers nightmares as a result of his military experiences. None of this is dwelt on too much, so does not become a cliché; mainly the reader is caught up in the investigation of Revitch’s death as Levine pursues the few leads he has, re-interviewing witnesses and relatives, until he stumbles across the possibility that the dead man may have been on the take.

Even when the case appears to be solved, there are three or four more twists in the story, twists that address issues of police corruption, gang warfare in LA, and the extremes of rich and poor who live in this city of dreams. I very much enjoyed the book. Levine has plenty of problems and neuroses to cope with, and I think that some of these will settle down a bit so that future novels (of which I hope there will be some) will become more measured as a result. The ending of the book (or rather, the several endings) are to me less convincing than the main story, perhaps because Levine seems to be able to do anything (shoot people, be shot, etc) and be instantly back on the case, which does not seem to me all that likely. Even so, one wants very much for him to solve the current case as well as the old one which is haunting him.

It is likely that this book will be compared to the early work of Michael Connelly, as Levine could develop into a next-generation Harry Bosch. I think the comparison stands up well. Miles Corwin still has some way to go to develop the deceptively easy and mournful, elegiac style that characterises Connelly’s cleverly plotted novels, but on this evidence, he could certainly get there. I very much enjoyed my first encounter with Ash Levine’s life and his LAPD, and hope it will not be the last.

I thank the publisher, Oceanview, for so kindly sending me a copy of this novel.

03 November 2010

My three reviews for Euro Crime during October were of very different books: the latest exciting journalism-crime case for Swedish reporter Annika Bengstrom; a detailed and (seemingly) realistic Scottish police procedural with a senior female protagonist; and a Jack Reacher adventure thriller set in Nebraska. From my reviews:

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund: I found the novel a completely absorbing read and continue to regard this series as second to none in contemporary crime writing. Annika is both a serious-minded, determined protagonist, and a brave heroine for our strange, mixed-up times. *****

Shadowplay by Karen Campbell: Of all the UK police series being written today, I think Karen Campbell's has rapidly become my favourite, mainly for its authenticity and for the character of Anna, a convincingly portrayed woman who is ambitious yet not prepared to sacrifice any of her own personal principles in order to smooth her path. For this reason, she's probably admired by her colleagues more than she realises. I think this series is so far impressively varied (each of the three books has had a very different focus) and well written. I am looking forward to more. ***

Worth Dying For by Lee Child: As usual, my verdict on this novel is that if you like Jack Reacher stories, you'll like this one. It contains all the ingredients that make this series such a success: tough hero adhering to his own moral code and standing up for the "true" American values that transcend officialdom; some exciting set-pieces; easy to read – the prose is not as simplistic as is found in some other bestselling novels but is pretty easygoing; a plot that provides a bit of mystery and suspense without taxing the brain too much; and plenty of wish-fulfillment concerning ethics and values that we'd all like for our society but which are unlikely ever to happen. Don't go looking for holes in the plot as there are very many of them indeed. *

At Petrona I posted 14 reviews, with a pretty good global spread. Some of these books I enjoyed more than others, but there were at least some things to like in all of them, and a lot of things to like in some of them! I've given them one, two or three stars here, to indicate my own relative favourites among this particular batch.

Although I very much liked many of these titles, my book of the month has to be Red Wolf by Liza Marklund, translator Neil Smith. Don't let this put anyone off from trying some of the others, though, as there are some very good novels in October's selections.

02 November 2010

The second book about DI Mark Tartaglia is a jolly good read which I enjoyed far more than his debut outing in Die With Me. I had put off reading Our Lady of Pain for a while owing to its title, cover and "teaser" words, which I find less than inviting - as well as a slight ambivalence about the first novel (see my review). As it turns out, Our Lady of Pain is a classic police procedural with nothing to do with the picture (or teaser words). It isn't among the best crime novels I have read this year, but it is a good read, nonetheless.

Tartaglia is the grandson of Italian immigrants who settled in Edinburgh. He and his sister, the matchmaking Nicoletta, both live in London: she is a lecturer in Italian at London University; he is in charge of one of the murder squads based in Barnes, south-west London. He is single, rides a motorbike and is portrayed as very handsome and eligible. He’s called out to investigate the case of a woman who had been murdered while out running in Holland Park, and the bulk of the ensuing novel describes how he and his team carry out their work of interviewing witnesses, searching apartments and so on, to try to find the perpetrator – no easy task.

Rachel Tenison, the victim, was a loner, so it takes Tartaglia and his loyal sergeant Sam (short for Samantha) Donovan some time to find out much about her associates and her life. At the start of their investigation, rather too much of the plot involves Tartaglia or Donovan having to re-interview witnesses who don’t seem to be entirely truthful, in order to get them to admit further details that they consider irrelevant to the investigation. I don’t find this a very satisfactory way of moving a plot along, but it is certainly better than the other genre standby of finding more bodies.

One of the unusual aspects of the case is the discovery of part of a poem by Swinburne on the body (hence the book’s title). This clue leads Tartaglia to a year-old, closed investigation of the death of a woman who was a professor of English literature (including the works of Swinburne) at the university. Tartaglia and Donovan are convinced that the two cases must be related, but how? Their quest is complicated by the reluctance of the investigating officer, Simon Turner, to re-open the old case as it might make him and his recently deceased boss look bad if they failed to unearth any crucial information at the time. Turner reluctantly joins Tartaglia’s team for the purposes of combining the investigations; it is he who finds a crucial suspect, and Donovan who makes the link between the two cases.

Once the second case is uncovered, the pace of this novel picks up considerably. The author weaves in the social lives of the detectives and other police staff into her narrative, as well as a possible romantic diversion between Tartaglia and one of the witnesses to the Rachel Tenison case. There are a couple of twists to the tale, one of which I anticipated and the other I didn’t, but unfortunately the author did not resist repeating her “woman in peril” ending from the first book. The gradual realisation by a female character that she is on her own with a possible murderer is a cliché which renders the ending a bit flat and perfunctory. Another slightly disappointing aspect is that I did not feel that a great sense of location was conveyed, other than the occasional description of a traditional pub or a snowy park which could have been anywhere.

I don’t mean to quibble: this novel is a jolly good, solid police procedural with two characters, Tartaglia and Donovan, who are interesting and individual, if in need of development. I like the juxtaposition of the work and personal lives of the police, and will certainly read the next in this series.

31 October 2010

This engrossing, haunting novel is told from the point of view of Beatrice, a young English woman who is a successful commercial art designer in New York, recently engaged to Tod. At the start of the novel, Beatrice is in her sister’s London flat, looking out of the window at the hordes of media clamouring for a quote or interview. Tess, Beatrice’s younger sister, has disappeared. We deduce that the circumstances are dramatic and awful; soon, via Beatrice’s thoughts, we come to understand what has happened.

It is hard to write a review of this novel, because a bare plot description removes the many subtleties of the story of Tess’s life (gradually uncovered by her sister in the days after Beatrice’s precipitous arrival in the UK). Suffice to say that Beatrice decides to find out for herself what happened, dismissive of the official explanation which is universally accepted.

This novel is a very powerful, and convincing, account of a relationship between sisters as well as of grief and its after-effects. It is mostly told in the form of an internal letter from one sister to the other, which adds a beautiful element. There’s also a very moving subplot about the redemption of another relationship – that of a mother and her daughter. The way in which one daughter gradually realises the truth about her childhood perceptions is quite marvellous.

I really loved this book, and would urge anyone to read it. I was lucky enough to start it on a day when I’d booked a holiday from work, as I spent quite literally all day reading it from page 1 first thing in the morning, to the last page in the mid-afternoon. The crime plot is not as good as the rest of the book – the identity of the perpetrator is too obvious; the much-discussed "twist" at the end not a proper twist; and unfortunately the area of clinical research is completely misunderstood (though the author does a good job on describing the science of a single-gene defect). The details of hospital practice and treatment of visitors are also somewhat inconsistent with what I know of reality.

The power of this novel is in its depiction of the relationships of a mother and two daughters, and the inner lives of the girls. I loved it, and am glad that the novel is enjoying such success as a result of being one of the Richard and Judy book club selections this year.

29 October 2010

In the oppressive heat of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, you can’t even swim in the sea to cool off because of the giant jellyfish. Detective Dusty (Frances) Buchanan is a tough, smart, 30-something female cop who is single after the end of a live-in relationship with a lawyer, and who before the novel opens has been instrumental in identifying a leading suspect in the murder of a British backpacker – the region’s highest-profile murder case since Lindy Chamberlain’s baby Azaria was taken by a dingo. The presumed perpetrator, a man called Gardner, is in jail awaiting trial. Dusty is uneasy about his guilt, but is taken off the case by her new boss, “the big C”, and put onto more mundane tasks.

Depressed by the office politics at the station and frustrated by her single status, the resolutely upfront and unspun Dusty keeps herself fit by swimming in the pool in her yard and by running on the beach. For much of the first half of the book we become immersed in her life and that of the people in Darwin, fascinatingly portrayed with great local colour, as we gradually become aware that sinister events are occurring – possibly connected to a local Vietnam Veterans’ group, or possibly related to a local brothel whose location remains obscure to Dusty (and the rest of the police, who are all more concerned about the Gardner case than in anything else).

Dusty is a great character. She gives as good as she gets verbally as well as physically, but at the same time she’s vulnerable and sympathetic. She’s friends with Trace and Miriam, two very different aboriginal Australians, and the author portrays vividly the coexistence of these cultures at the edge of this hot land. As the build-up to the inevitable storms and rains continues, so does Dusty’s conviction that there is a murder to be investigated whatever her boss might say. With the aid of a German birdwatcher (there is a delightful sequence where Dusty picks him up in a bar), Dusty manages to get herself busted back into uniform and ostracised for an almost-fatal accident (which emphatically was not her fault). Undeterred, she makes an unlikely ally and sets forth to follow up what leads she can under the radar – and in the process finds some evidence that completely changes the earlier case.

There are so many great touches and themes to this novel – I can only urge you to read it. It’s full of what I call “grown up” humour, and there are so many clever nuances where Dusty’s straightforward and “straight down the line” methods bring rewards in unexpected ways, not least her caring attitude towards animals – the scenes with the pig, and their part in revealing the plot, are particularly great. The reader eager to learn about life in other regions will be well-rewarded with plenty of vernacular and vignettes. Yet along with the unsentimental and upfront telling, the novel also represents an emotional core – the author is very wise about emotions and failings; above all there is bags of humanity in the book. Combine this with an attractively independent heroine, plenty of action and humour, and a wonderful sense of place and culture, and you could want no more from a book. I do hope very much to meet Dusty again one day.

27 October 2010

For a long time I have been planning to read Ken Bruen, a highly regarded writer, and have finally made good my intention in the shape of The Guards, the first novel in a series about Jack Taylor. Taylor is in his mid-50s and has just been sacked from the Garda after many years of warnings. He’s been told he is good at finding things, so he sets himself up as a private eye in Galway, Ireland. He’s also a complete drunk, which fits this stereotypical bill (his “office” is a pub).

The Guards is a very good book indeed. The plot is ostensibly about the unexplained suicide of several young teenage girls whose bodies are found washed up in the sea at Nimmo’s pier. The mother of one of these girls is certain her daughter did not kill herself, and asks Taylor to find out how the girl died. Taylor’s only friend (by his own admission), the sinister artist Sutton, has his own ideas about how to find out what’s going on, and Taylor is almost a passive partner in the ensuing “investigation”.

Really, though, the investigative aspects are perfunctory at best, and the true subject of the book is Taylor himself – his past, his feelings, convictions, and how he has come to the end of the line. As well as Sutton, Taylor interacts with other vividly sketched people during the novel – Cathy B, a singer whom Taylor pays to help him find out information; the aged barman Sean; Ann, the dead girl’s mother; and various other characters from the street and from the old, traditional days which Taylor inhabits in his mind. Taylor is not an obviously sympathetic person – and someone's alcoholism isn’t intrinsically an interesting subject to read about (how many different ways can someone fall off the wagon and get on it again?). Yet the author has two great things going for him: he’s a very good writer, using various stylistic forms, poetry, wit and quotations to weave a mesmeric whole; and Taylor is a metaphor for all that is tough about life’s essential condition – the grinding boredom of work, the easy distractions of the shallow existence, the inevitability of death, and so on. This having been said, Taylor is not a construct but a warm human being, showing integrity and commitment to people who he likes (even when they are winos and other of life's dropouts). Throughout the book, Taylor has the idea of “escaping” his past and his fate and moving to London. He even buys a ticket - which, of course, he is told by the travel agent can only be one-way. I wonder if he will ever get there.

I was immersed in this book and particularly responded to the observations of life in the city and the sense of the protagonist's separateness from the mainstream (to which he is tied by the symbol of a coat) – a staple of literature as well as popular fiction, and extremely well done here. As a crime story the novel is not that good – there isn’t any detection or suspense or even much of a puzzle element. But the novel is both emotionally honest and true to itself, and achieves something that is very difficult to do – creates a sympathetic portrait of a weak man who has chosen not to take the paths offered to him in his youth by his father and other mentors, but has become a washed-up drunk. I could quibble at the way details of every-day life are skated-over in the novel (where does the rent come from, for example?), but I won’t because I can certainly admit to being a convert to Ken Bruen on the basis of this novel.

26 October 2010

Michael Haller, the Lincoln lawyer, is presented with an unusual proposition – to be a special prosecutor for a 24-year-old case in which a young girl was taken from her garden one Sunday afternoon and within an hour found dead in a dumpster. A suspect, the driver of a tow truck, was quickly identified and the girl’s sister identified him as the abductor. He was tried and imprisoned for the crime.

Now, DNA analysis of some of the original evidence raises questions about the conviction, and the criminal, Jason Jessup, wins the right for a retrial. Although the detectives and lawyers involved in the original case have all died or are too ill to contribute now, the DA’s office wants an independent prosecution to reduce the damages it will have to pay out if Jessup gets off (as seems likely). Haller, until now firmly on the defence side of the line, agrees to take the case if he can employ his ex-wife, Maggie “McFierce”, as his second chair, and LAPD detective Harry Bosch as his investigator. The main plot of the book alternates the story of Bosch’s (third-person) investigation of the old case, and Haller’s first-person account of the preparation for the trial and, later, the trial itself.

The Reversal is typical, superior fare from Michael Connelly. The book works fine as a standalone but will be more enjoyable if you have read previous novels in the series, particularly the more recent ones (starting with The Lincoln Lawyer) in which Haller appears. As well as a classic investigative plot, the author is interested in exploring the human costs of crime and of the criminal justice system. As an aside I was quite shocked to realise that while a trial is under way in the US, the jurors, defence and prosecution teams all mix together in the breaks between the court sessions.

At the heart of this novel is the testimony of Sarah, the sister of the girl who was killed. Before the trial starts, Bosch and Maggie track her down and find out what has happened to her in the intervening years, since the “shearing of life that happened at that moment” when her sister was taken. This phrase speaks directly to the appeal of Connelly’s books – in modern, materialistic, shallow and crime-ridden America, the author understands this “shearing” of a life that can happen in a single moment and change it forever, and his characters are those who are there for those people in the ensuing years - to speak up for them, defend and protect them. This is big-picture stuff, but there are also plenty of little observations that make this book (in common with others by Connelly) a joy – for example when Maggie is briskly summarising the case at the outset and fails to notice, unlike Haller (Bosch’s half-brother, and more in tune with him), that “Bosch is somebody who still used the phone book instead of the internet.”

Connelly builds up the suspense in The Reversal, but does not end this novel in any of the ways one might think based on the various plotlines. It is as if the author realises he does not need to provide a manufactured climax, but can satisfy the reader by simply telling it like it is.

24 October 2010

Theo Tate is an ex-cop turned private investigator, who as this novel opens is supervising the exhumation of Henry Martins, a man who died some years ago. His daughter firmly believed that he had been murdered by his second wife, for whom he had abandoned his first family. The police were not convinced, but the widow’s new husband has also now died in suspicious circumstances, hence the exhumation. As Tate watches the digger at work, he notices what he at first thinks are giant, black bubbles in the lake adjoining this part of the huge cemetery. Soon he realises that the disturbance is, in fact, bodies rising to the surface – a sight that makes Bruce, the man digging up the grave, run away – in terror or in guilt?

After this set-piece opening, Tate embarks on a fast-moving spiral familiar to readers of the genre. We soon learn that the reason he resigned from the Christchurch, NZ, police force two years ago was because his wife and young daughter were victims of a drunk driver. Emily, the girl, was killed and Bridget, the wife, is in a catatonic state and cannot recognise anyone. The man responsible for the accident was caught but given a suspended sentence. He subsequently vanished, and most of his then-colleagues assumed Tate was responsible for the disappearance (we find out whether this supposition is correct later in this book).

When the coffin that has been exhumed from Martins’s grave is opened, an unexpected and gruesome discovery is made. At this point I began to lose sympathy with Tate, as he takes a crucial piece of evidence and begins his own investigation into the case, without keeping his old colleagues in the loop. During the first two-thirds of the book he questions bereaved families a in an unforgivably cruel way in my opinion, as well as impeding the official investigation. Using his inside information to discover more leads and more victims, he creates a “murder room” in the process to record his investigation and leads - presumably setting himself up in competition with the police so he can solve the crime before they do? At the same time, he’s involved in violent altercations with the father of Bruce the absentee gravedigger and with Bruce himself, as well as being drawn into some coded, threatening interactions with the priest of the cemetery’s church.

As well as being a crime thriller, Cemetery Lake provides plenty of shlock-horror set piece descriptions of rotting bodies and various nasty things that happen to them during the course of the novel. I don’t mind these per se, particularly as the rather flat narrative protects the reader from the full extent of the "yuk" factor, but I did mind that I could not believe much of the main story. One example of this is that the police are investigating the bodies in the lake by searching graves in the cemetery – they are also looking for Tate and the gravediggers. Yet if they had conducted even the most basic search, or simply looked at the graves of Tate’s daughter or Bruce’s mother, they would immediately have found crucial evidence in the shape of recently (re)dug grave plots. Unfortunately, I think the author is keener to attempt to shock his readers by his horror-novel descriptions of things happening to decomposing bodies, etc, than in providing a credible plot.

Despite his old mates trying to keep him out of the investigation, Tate ploughs on regardless of the sensitivities of the families of the bereaved. Eventually after a shocking event in his office, he becomes so distraught that he turns to drink. After being on a bender for a month, he follows someone he regards as a suspect and jumps a red light, crashing into a car being driven by a woman whose young daughter is a passenger. Tate has become the man he has spent the last two years hating, but this realization does not stop him from immediately borrowing another car and continuing his single-minded quest.

Cemetery Lake is written at a fast pace and despite its various plot holes it does engage the attention, even though the “solution” to the main case is too extreme to convince. The main problem with the novel for me was the character of Tate, who is potentially interesting but just too unsympathetic even taking into account his tragic past, given all his unethical, cruel and thoughtless actions. His heart is in the right place, but unfortunately his ego is the most important thing to him, which combined with his action-man toughness makes him hard to like or to care much about. I think the novel is fine for those who like lots of events (including revolting ones) and action, but is less successful on an emotional, credible level. I was also disappointed not to come away with more of a sense of Christ Church, New Zealand.

18 October 2010

Kittyhawk Down by Garry DisherBitter Lemon Press, 2008 (first published in Australia in 2003)

Kittyhawk Down, the second in the Hal Challis/Ellen Destry series of police procedurals set in the fictional Old Peninsula district in southern Victoria, Australia, is even better than the first, Dragon Man, and that’s saying something. The characters have gelled and the author is more assured in his plotting and pacing this time round.

Hal Challis is an Inspector in the Homicide Squad, “tall, thin but hard boned, and looked slightly out of date in his jeans, scuffed flying jacket and plain leather shoes. His sunglasses were not an accessory perched above his forehead but shaded his eyes. He’d never worn a T-shirt as an undershirt or tracksuit pants out of doors. He’d never owned a pair of runners. His hair was straight, dark and lifted a little in the wind. It was cut once a month by a young woman who worked beside her father in a Waterloo barbershop. She was skilful and attentive, and for the sum of $10 returned him to the world with a neatly shaped head.”

Challis is investigating the case of an unidentified dead body that has been washed ashore, and slightly uneasily settling in to his relationship with the editor of the local newspaper, Tessa Kane. His sergeant, Ellen Destry, is herself on the trail of a man who attacks “courting couples” in parked cars at night, and pretty soon gets a good result, thanks to solid policing of the team, including the attractive character of constable Pam Murphy, her less attractive partner John Tankard and the sensitive Scobie Sutton. The thoughts and actions of these five policemen and women are the backbone of the novel, as they go about their professional and personal lives – personal lives that are intertwined in the local community and as such bring them into contact with people who may be of professional interest concerning various petty and not-so-petty crimes.

Challis’s somewhat desultory investigation and his ambivalence about Tessa and his imprisoned wife are swept aside by a series of incidents, starting in a small fashion but escalating way out of control. “The Meddler” is a person who writes anonymous letters to the newspaper complaining about petty infringements of the law by various residents or about failings of the local authorities. Tessa has made these letters into a regular column, but out of this initiative and an (uncharacteristically cruel) article she writes about a man who walks around with a pet ferret on a lead, are the seeds of some ghastly future events.

A lonely and introspective man, Challis has one hobby, which is to restore an old wrecked plane, the Dragon, which in 1942 helped ferry Dutch refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion of Java, from Broome to Perth. The Dragon is kept in a hangar at a local aerodrome, along with other vintage planes, one of which is the Kittyhawk of the title. Its owner is Janice Casement, whom everyone calls Kitty after her plane, and Challis feels more than a passing interest in her. One day, Challis witnesses a crazy incident while Kitty is attempting to land her plane, and feels compelled to investigate. While doing so, he finds some unsettling evidence in Kitty’s “office” area of the hangar that may involve or implicate her in some more serious, drug-related, investigations.

The novel tells the story of these several, apparently unconnected investigations, set against the evocative and vivid descriptions of community life in the Peninsula. Because we are following the lives of several law-enforcement characters, the same people who are questioned by the police in one chapter sometimes crop up in other circumstances – for example one of the policemen has a child at the same school as two “persons of interest” – and this adds a dimension to the novel that is quite unusual in my experience of the genre. While conveying a great sense of place, however, the author never loses sight of his storytelling role, and as the pages turn the reader gradually becomes aware of threads tightening up and connections coming together – how or why is, pretty much, kept obscure until the end, whose tense conclusion is sad in parts, but also satisfying.

I’ll end the review by quoting a passage that summarises one of the appeals of this series for me, concerning Challis’s visit to someone whose husband has been shot and killed. “She was red-eyed, her grief raw. Ostensibly he was there to ask her some gentle questions, but he learnt nothing new and hadn’t expected to; visiting and comforting the bereaved was the other side of a murder investigation. Waves of misery and anger can spread from a single act of homicide and swamp a family and its friends. Challis represented order. Where things were falling apart for the bereaved, he was competent, professional, focused, and familiar with a bewildering system. Sometimes his relationships with bereaved families and individuals lasted years. His was a shoulder to cry on; he was a link to the beloved victim; he represented the investigation itself and so offered hope and justice. He’d provide his phone number and find himself talking calmly, patiently, at the darkest hours of the night, and visiting from time to time, and taking people who’d almost lost heart into the squad room and showing them the desks, the computers, the photo arrays – the sense of justice at work. It often meant a lot and the flow was two-way, for as the bereaved felt valued and encouraged, so did he.” An excellent series, and one which I shall be continuing to read with eager anticipation.

16 October 2010

Experimental Heart is a novel in two parts: the first is an account of the biologists in a leading institute in London, and the research they do; the second is a plot-driven story. In chapter 1, Andy O’Hara, a postdoctoral researcher, is working late one night in the lab. This is normal for him; his life consists of 13-18-hour days at work, seven days a week, a vending-machine diet, odd hours in the pub, and snatched hours of sleep inbetween. He’s a loner, despite being an attractive man who the other female characters in the novel either have fallen for in the past or would like to in future. The reason for his driven, somewhat arrogant and solitary nature lies, we are led to understand, in his family background. His father was himself a scientist who died in his 40s of a malignant melanoma, and Andy has chosen a similar career in response, keeping an old photo of his father in his desk drawer as an inspiration.

Andy is interested in Gina, whom he can watch through his window as she works in her own late-night laboratory routine. Unlike Andy, Gina works in the commercial sector, seeking practical medical applications of the research she does. Andy spends quite a bit of time trying to pluck up courage to strike up a friendship (and perhaps more) with her, though is constantly foiled by work and the fact that Gina always seems to be monopolised by other people. While Andy muses on Gina and struggles with his feelings about other female characters, we are told an enormous amount of detail about the experiments that he and his colleagues perform and the possible biological implications; about the working and drinking life of young, childless scientists; and about the publications, seminars and conferences that form the background to their tense occupations. The author is very much on a mission to show the reader what it’s like to be a scientist in a highly competitive environment where there aren’t enough jobs for everyone and where you are in an invisible race to be the first to publish your results.

Because scientific research is such a specialist and intellectual occupation, the characters have a camaraderie (even when they irritate each other) and a sense of “separateness” from the rest of society; the author is excellent at conveying this rather superior alienation. In the background to this story is a group of animal rights activists who are both frighteningly violent and rather well-informed about the research going on at the institute. These activists, as well as several parties attended by the characters where there are some convenient “non scientist” flatmates or guests, provide a platform for us to be told the various ideological positions about genetically modified crops, research on living organisms, and other dangers or benefits of contemporary biology research.

All this is fascinating if you are interested in what makes a small group of scientists tick and in following the ins and outs of their research. It might be a little hard-going if you aren’t. In the second half, however, the author drops much of the explanatory tone and instead gets stuck into a tense story in which Andy and his colleagues realise that Gina may be being dragged into a project that is not only highly unethical but extremely dangerous. This part of the novel is very clever, and the tension the author wrings out of measuring radioactivity or running a gel is truly nail-biting!

For me, the strengths of the book are in the way it explains rather technical and complex scientific concepts in an accessible manner, and the scientific detective story of the second half - not a story in which it is a challenge to work out what is going on and who is responsible, but exciting in the thriller sense. On the other hand, I did not find the half-dozen or so characters that interesting, so could not care that much about their romantic ups and downs, though I was certainly rooting for Andy and Gina at the end.

This novel is steeped in a passion for biological research. Just as many books have appeal because of their beautifully conveyed sense of a particular geographical place, science is the country of Experimental Heart, and it is one that this author conveys authentically and lovingly. It is scientific research that is the hero or heroine of this enjoyable novel.

Jennifer L. Rohn, the author, is a cell biologist and founder of LabLit, a wonderful website that promotes and celebrates science in culture and fiction. Find out more about her at her website. A selection of reviews of Experimental Heart is also available at the author’s website.

15 October 2010

Exmoor dripped with dirty bracken, rough, colourless grass, prickly gorse and last year’s heather, so black it looked as if wet fire had swept across the landscape, taking the trees with it and leaving the most cold and exposed to face the winter unprotected. Drizzle dissolved the close horizons and blurred heaven and earth into a grey cocoon around the only visible landmark – a twelve-year-old boy in slick black waterproof trousers but no hat, alone with a spade.

This is the opening paragraph of Blacklands, the debut novel that won this year’s (2010) CWA Gold Dagger, and deservedly so. The story is that of Steven Lamb, the boy in the opening paragraph, who lives a relatively impoverished life, both materially and emotionally, in a small Exmoor village. Steven lives with his Nan, mother Lettie, younger brother Davey and has experienced a succession of “uncles” passing through (two of whom fathered Steven and Davey). His mother is tense and irascible, always distracted (probably about money), whereas his Nan spends most of her time looking out of the window, barely acknowledging Steven, the outsider in the little family. We soon learn that underlying the family dynamics is the fact that Steven’s real uncle, Billy (Lettie’s sister), disappeared when he was a bit younger that Steven is now. It transpires that he was abducted and presumed killed by Arnold Avery, who is now in prison serving a life sentence for murdering some other children whose bodies he buried on the moor.

Nobody is allowed into Billy’s room, which is kept exactly as it was when he disappeared. Steven becomes obsessed with the idea that if he finds his uncle’s body, his Nan will stop being sad and the family will become close. He spends most of his time outside school in this fruitless task, making a map of the places he’s dug up. After an incident involving his friend Lewis and some Lego, Steven learns the bare facts of Billy’s presumed death from his mother, and conceives the idea of writing to Avery to find the location of the “grave”. Thus begins an extraordinary campaign between the boy and the prisoner, who can only write the most banal, brief letters to each other, but who communicate on a far deeper, more intimate level. Who will “win” this secret, psychological war? Each is determined in pursuit of his goal, but inevitably one will outwit the other.

The novel’s appeal lies not only in this intensely strategic exchange, but also in the depiction of life in a small village among a deprived family, and community, in twenty-first century England. The book is full of telling little details: the effect on Steven of some unusual praise from a teacher; a visit by Steven and his brother to the library in the local town; the ritualised interactions of Steven and Lewis; and Uncle Jude’s attempts at gardening.

I loved the book, though it is not a “crime” novel in the usual sense. Quite a bit of it is from the point of view of Avery, the child killer, but the author maintains a tone of neutral interest that succeeds in avoiding the usual pitfalls of novelistic representations of such people, making the reader interested in Avery’s part in the drama, while not having to become embroiled in the details of his revolting crimes. Towards the end I felt there were a couple of deviations from believability (a section in the prison and subsequently) and in its otherwise admirably cool yet sympathetic and deeply empathetic portrait of Steven in his community environment. Without a doubt, thought the book’s main success is in its portrayal of Steven, who very much reminds me of Harry Potter in his serious modesty, in his feeling that he’s not very good at anything, and in his analytical tenaciousness against what seem to him to be impossible odds. (Right at the end of the novel, an explicit comparison is made, which I felt unnecessary.) Overwhelmingly, though, I admire the achievement of the author for this well-constructed, observant and insightful book, not least because it is her first novel.

13 October 2010

Mo Hayder is back on form with a vengeance in Gone, her latest novel about detective Jack Caffery of the Bristol major crime investigation unit and police diver sergeant Flea Marley. After two promising but, for this reader, eventually disappointing outings for Caffery in his Bristol persona (Ritual and Skin), the author here delivers a cracking, classic police procedural novel that must be one of the best of its type I’ve read for a good while.

The story is about missing girls, a subject too distressing to contemplate, but here handled in a sensitive way. There are none of Hayder’s trademark obsessions with visceral or pathological details in this novel, leaving us with a jolly good detective story with a classic but clever plot. A man steals and drives away in a car from a city-centre parking garage, as Rose Bradley, a vicar’s wife, packs her food shopping in the boot. Her 13-year-old daughter is in the back seat. Caffery and his team, as well as all the regular police that can be spared, are soon out searching for the girl. Flea, a person given to watery premonitions, feels convinced that the old, buried canal is relevant, so takes her team of divers down the dangerous, dark tunnels to search along the sludge and sunken, abandoned barges – a remarkably atmospheric and convincingly described setting. Nothing is found, and the parents are increasingly desperate.

Before too long, another girl is taken in a similar manner. The description of this abduction is highly suspenseful, as the reader is pretty sure it is going to happen sooner or later – but the circumstances are nevertheless a shock as Janice, the mother concerned, becomes distracted while Emily is waiting in the back seat of their car. We have been witnessing cracks appearing in Janice’s marriage before this crisis occurs, cracks that we feel pretty sure will give way to a full-blown break-up. Yet again, the direction taken by the author in this regard is a surprise.

Caffery and Flea pursue their separate off-the-books investigations. In Caffery’s case, this means a couple of encounters with his alter ego, the Walking Man, for possible enlightenment; and in Flea’s, this means leaving her somewhat demoralised team to the official search while she follows the hunches of her dreams (mainly involving her dead father) into the old canal again. But these somewhat mystical asides are just a fraction of the main action, which focuses on two main elements – the police investigation and the effect of the disappearances on the two families concerned. I’m not going to give away any more of the plot than I’ve already mentioned because it would spoil too much of the pleasure a reader must surely feel in the clever construction of layers that the author has provided. As I have mentioned, although the subject is a horrible one, the author never oversteps the mark into unnecessarily explicit or horrible description, yet she provides a blisteringly paced, tense thriller that you honestly won’t want to stop reading until you have finished it.

The novel is best appreciated if you have read the previous Jack Caffery novels, particularly the last two, although the reader of Gone is provided with a few brief updates of the necessary back-story, not least the misunderstanding that lies heavily between Flea and Caffery after the complicated fallout of the car accident of the previous two books. It is far superior to these earlier novels, though, perhaps even touching on the excellence of the author’s, and Caffery’s, debut, Birdman. I very much hope this signifies the beginning of a fresh burst of life for this series – not least because the author has left things nicely poised for Caffrey and Flea, connected on the astral plane, to stop ignoring each other in the real world and have a meaningful conversation, which could lead who knows where? I don’t, but it will certainly be somewhere exciting on the evidence of Gone.

Mo Hayder's unforgettable debut, Birdman (here reviewed by Nicci Gerrard in the Observer) and its sequel, The Treatment(reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence by Luke Croll) were about Jack Caffery, then a London detective, and his search for his brother. The author then moved on to other books, the remarkably good Tokyo and the remarkably bad Pig Island. Subsequently, she moved Jack Caffery to Bristol and to date has written three novels in a series about him and Flea Marley: Ritual, Skinand Gone. Author's website.

11 October 2010

The year 1953 finds Emmanuel Cooper in Durban, no longer a policeman after the Morton’s fork he faced in A Beautiful Place to Die, working in the shipyards with other ex-army men of a variety of racial origins. Manual labour affords him some comfort as he recovers from the earlier events and from his previous wartime experiences, but he’s eager to accept an offer from his old boss and sort-of mentor, Major van Niekerk, to do some undercover work around the docks, identifying smugglers and other low-life. While out one night gathering intelligence, he stumbles across the body of a young boy, whom he quickly establishes has been murdered. After an altercation with three men, Cooper calls the police anonymously to report the death. Although he knows the risks to himself, he can’t ignore the boy’s plight, and so shadows the police as they investigate. Before he knows it, he’s a suspect in the crime. And this is only the start of a huge, and convoluted, series of troubles, scrapes and double-crosses in store for Cooper, involving an increasingly large cast of characters, some of whom appeared in the earlier novel.

For its first half, Let the Dead Lie is a compellingly exciting read, partly as a fast-moving investigation of a crime, and partly as a social commentary on the repressive and evil society of 1950s South Africa. Yet by the second half of this long novel, I felt that the pace was flagging a bit, and the confusion factor was getting unrealistically high as yet more people seem to know about private conversations and actions when they shouldn’t have done; or it is revealed that informants have followed Cooper’s every move – steps that to me often either seemed unnecessary or made me question why he was even being asked to undertake various tasks if the outcomes were already known. Throughout, though, the sense of social justice is a very strong theme, both the racism endemic in this cruel regime, in which even people who are married can’t admit their status, and in which poverty is rife, with many people living in awful conditions, relying on charitable handouts from the religiously inclined to survive.

Cooper is both a participant and an observer of this melee of events and of the lives of the many people he encounters during the novel – and those he meets seem to come from almost every possible race or background, so the reader gets a full picture of Durban life in the build-up to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps, for a novel, the picture is somewhat too full, blurring the effectiveness of the plot – but whatever one’s feelings about that, nobody could doubt that this is a novel with a big conscience, intent on revealing many shameful injustices that were accepted as the norm in their time but now, thankfully, exposed for what they really were.

I thank the publisher, Pan Macmillan, for my copy of this book. From the press release accompanying the book: Malla Nunn grew up in Swaziland before moving to Perth. She studied theatre in the USA, where she began writing and directing short films. Her first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, won the Sisters in Crime Davitt award for best crime novel by an Australian female author. It was shortlisted for an Edgar award for best novel. Malla Nunn lives in Sydney.

09 October 2010

Silence begins with the description of a murder that took place in 1974, in which a young teenage girl disappeared while riding her bicycle in the Finnish countryside. Her body is eventually found in a nearby lake. The main detective investigating the case is Antsi Ketola, and his failure to find the killer has haunted him ever since.

The main novel opens 33 years later, on the day of Ketola’s retirement. He is given a party by his colleagues, including detective Kimmo Joentaa, whom English-language readers met in the author’s previous novel Ice Moon. Ketola asks Joentaa to go with him to the archive in the basement of the police station to look for a model of the scene of the old crime that Ketola had made at the time. He wants to take it home with him before he leaves the force, so he tells the younger man about the old case.

Six months later, a bicycle is found near the cross marking the disappearance of Pia, the girl who was killed so many years before. Joentaa and his colleagues soon discover that it belongs to a 13-year-old girl who had been on her way to a sports class. Her parents are devastated as it gradually sinks in that their daughter has disappeared. Naturally, the police wonder if the two cases might be related, and Joentaa asks Ketola to help with the investigation.

Silence is a quietly compelling book, dwelling on the consequences of life’s losses and disappointments. Several of the characters are coming to terms with the deaths of children or spouses, and it transpires that Ketola himself has a son who is very disturbed. As may be inferred from the title, most of the characters suffer their pain in internal reflection, sometimes for many years. Others keep silent about nastier secrets, and this is rather hard for the reader to bear, as the consequences of silence are that someone can live a life surrounded by vulnerable and innocent people, and that crimes can proliferate in ways that are not hinted at in this novel, but are all-too obvious, and too awful to contemplate. This overshadows the book, making it almost intolerable to read - and I mean this as a compliment. Yet the novel does not have the haunting other-worldly quality of Ice Moon. Also, the irascibly funny characterisation of Ketola is not reprised in Silence: he’s eccentric, but somehow not the same person as the man portrayed previously. Nor is the outcome of the second (modern-day) crime entirely convincing. But compared with your average crime novel, Silence certainly stands out from the crowd and must surely be among the strongest of the genre published (in English) this year, not least by its ability to portray the pressures arising from years-long guilt and unhappiness.

07 October 2010

The third installment of this searing Australian series finds DS Jill Jackson working undercover, using the name Krystal Peters, in the slums of Sydney. She’s identifying plenty of low-life drug dealers, to the pleasure of her bosses, but is finding it a bit of a strain to maintain her facade. When she was a child, she was kidnapped and abused. Although she has superficially recovered from her ordeal by conquering her excessively ritualised life and achieving a degree of closure (described in Vodka Doesn’t Freeze), she’s still suffering, not least in her difficult relationship with her sister Cassie, a glamorous model and, unknown to her family, drug addict.

Jill’s story is one theme of this book. The other follows Seren (short for Serendipity), a young mother who has been wrongly imprisoned for a crime she did not commit – carrying large quantities of “ice” – and who has been abandoned by the man who was actually responsible, a smarmy lawyer who when he is not dealing drugs himself is getting other dealers acquitted and becoming very rich in the process of both activities. Seren reaches the end of her sentence (after some brutal descriptions of life in a women’s “correctional facility”) and, in order to be reunited with her 10-year-old son, acquiesces to a dull life in a cheap flat and a menial yet horrific job slaughtering chickens at a meat-processing plant. Seren, of course, is secretly plotting revenge on the man who got her into this trouble.

Black Ice has a lot going for it. It has an exciting, gritty plot and an attractively capable list of women characters. I am not quite sure, therefore, why I was not more involved in the story and the dilemmas these women face. Partly, I think the book is too sensationalistic without providing enough depth to the characters, giving the whole a bit of a soap-opera feel. People are not who they seem after being described positively for some time, but it isn’t explained why. Details are glossed-over, for example some pages are spent on describing just how broke Seren is on her release from prison, then in one sentence it is said that she has possessions “in storage” – with no indication of how she pays for this. Everything just seems to be that bit too exaggerated, and too much of the plot depends on accidents and mistakes – for example one character drops a camera being used to secretly film a drug deal, and another is recruited as an informer yet given a mobile phone to use which has crucial information on it leading the villains directly to ruin an investigation. Jill herself is a sympathetic character, but she’s like a moonstruck, wimpy teenager every time she meets a half-way handsome man (two colleagues and a drug dealer), which does not fit with other sections of the novel in which she is portrayed as a dedicated, focused professional.

Black Ice is certainly an exciting page-turner, and raises tough questions about the value of punishment and rehabilitation as well as the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. The relationship between Jill and Cassie is perhaps the strongest element in my estimation. But the harrowing themes of the book are presented rather in the manner popularised by Martina Cole: Seren’s compulsive purchasing of $1,000 designer shoes and her spending every cent of her rent money on high fashion does not gel, for me, with her stated principles and adoration of her son, especially as the pages describing the shoes and the sexy clothes she buys are more detailed and involved than those describing the boy and his life. The physical descriptions of the women (particularly Seren and Cassie) could come from a glossy, airhead magazine. Something about this book’s odd combination of romanticised fiction with the shocking details of drugs and violence does not really ring true for me, although I do not doubt the sincerity of its intentions.

05 October 2010

Audition is a book that is both quick to read and deceptively simple in narrative. It opens with Shige, the 15 year old son of widower Aoyama, urging his father to remarry. Aoyama’s wife Ryoko died of viral cancer seven years previously, aged 35. Father and son were devastated, spending years in quiet, usually unspoken grief, gradually achieving an easygoing, mutually supportive (if relatively silent) relationship. Aoyama, largely thanks to his wife’s parents’ money, owns a video production company, and in the years immediately after his wife’s death has done well financially by making popular videos of religious scenes and, his crowning achievement, after much persistence and persuasion, filming the performance of a reclusive woman famous in Germany for playing the pipe organ.

We are told that Aoyama has had plenty of casual encounters with women since his wife’s death, but nothing serious. He tells his friend Yoshikawa of his desire to meet and marry a suitable woman, and Yoshikawa, who has connections at a radio station, comes up with the idea of holding a fake audition for a role in a film. The woman Ayoama selects from the hundreds who apply is very different from the rest (who sound like cloned entrants to the X factor): the rest of the novel tells, from Ayoama’s perspective, the story of their courtship up to its horrific climax.

The novel is very much a satire of modern society, attitudes and customs. It describes a typical example of young Japanese women’s expensive tastes thus: “I have a friend who raises tropical fish. She took out a loan to buy this huge aquarium, and now she’s working two jobs to pay off the loan. And another girl I know was collecting these beautiful wineglasses from Europe. She did word-processing at home and took on so much extra work that she barely had time to sleep and finally made herself ill.” Throughout the novel, we are shown the contrast between the younger generation, who want everything (whether or not they need it) without making sacrifices or learning the necessary skills, yet (in the person of Shige, Ayoama’s son, and his schoolfriends) are under intense pressure to decide how they are going to survive and work in an uncertain economic environment – and the older generation, where people are depicted as acting in a more considered, thoughtful fashion, prepared to put in years of effort and wait for life’s rewards. (Of course, these stereotypes do not apply solely to Japan, they'd be equally applicable anywhere, bearing in mind that as they are stereotypes there are many individual exceptions to the trend.)

As a thriller, this book does not work that well for me because the reader only sees events from Ayoama’s perspective. Hence the crime aspects are reduced to a few heavy hints leading up to the climactic descriptions of nasty events, without psychological insight, albeit with a strong sense of irony about a society where emotions are rigidly repressed or stylised - as evidenced, for example, by the fakery of the audition and the fakery of the applicants, fakeries that could be hiding anything at all. As a story about a small, close family learning to survive and move on after the death of one of them, the book works much better. Some of the descriptions of the family before the wife’s death, and of the adaptations the father and son have made, are quietly moving. Many of the social observations are acute, but provided with a light touch and quite fascinating. As an aside, the translation is American, not English, English, and makes a good job of the passages where various aspects of Japanese cultural norms are explained, not least the psychology of eating in sushi bars.

Apparently, Audition has been made into an “acclaimed cult movie”, one I shall not be watching because of the extended violent ending. (According to Wikipedia, to which I am not linking for this purpose, the film is far more gory and contains added, violent scenes compared with the book. )

The author, Ryu Murakami, has written several successful crime novels (“Japan’s master of the psycho-thriller” according to the blurb of this one), including In the Miso Soup and Piercing, which although I have not read them, seem from my reading of reviews, etc, to be cruelly observed satires on Japanese society and its values.

I borrowed this novel from the “quick choice” section of the local library.

03 October 2010

David and Jan Harewood are a seemingly typical American couple. He’s a journalist at the local paper; she works for a plumbing supplier. Their four-year-old son, Ethan, is looked after by David’s parents while the couple are at work. Times are hard for the US newspaper industry, and David is not popular with management for his investigation of kick-backs to local politicians by a business consortium keen to build and run a prison - on land owned by the paper’s publisher, adding a further vested interest to the mix. Jan has recently become very depressed. Increasingly concerned, David encourages her to see a doctor, which she does, and in attempts to cheer her up, takes her out to dinner and on a trip to follow up a lead for the prison story. Eventually, in an attempt to snap out of it, Jan buys tickets for the small family to go to the nearby theme park for the day. While they are there, disaster strikes.

Linwood Barclay can be relied on to deliver a fast-moving and involving mystery plot, and Never Look Away is no exception. As the novel progresses, nothing is as it seems, and David becomes increasingly desperate as his home and professional lives seem to be imploding. Could things get worse? Yes, they could.

There is a relatively obvious twist to the story , but this is delivered (with panache) early on, so that we can guess that there are other revelations in store, as our perceptions of events shift with our new knowledge of some of the main characters, and how past actions inform present ones.

It’s hard to do this book justice in a review without giving away the plot, but despite one or two wobbles in the logic, I highly recommend this novel as an exciting read to the extent that you might miss your stop if you’re reading it on the train or bus.

25 September 2010

In a change of pace from my recent reading, I’ve just completed this novel (via the library) by the refreshing Hazel Holt. Any Man’s Death appears to be the nineteenth in this series about Sheila Malory, of which I’ve read quite a few, but not for some years. This title launches straight in and no explanation is given of Sheila’s circumstances, so a new reader might not immediately realise that she is a writer, animal-lover and lively widow who has a rather conventional lawyer son, Michael, and a best friend, Rosemary. She encounters many murders among the villages on the south coast of England, and solves them in brisk fashion.

Any Man’s Death follows this formula, and it’s a light, diverting read. The book is set in the village of Mere Barton, near to Sheila’s home. While she’s visiting friends there, someone suggests that it would be nice if there were to be a history of the village in book form, in common with other local villages. The retired district nurse, Annie Roberts, a busybody who organises everyone and is chair of all the committees, zeroes in on Sheila and persuades her to undertake the task. Hence Sheila visits most of the residents, to a man and woman the comfortably-off middle class, in order to collect their photographs and memories of the old days. Most of them, however, are people who’ve made or inherited money and moved to the village, often to retire, as it is nowadays too expensive for families who have lived there for generations to afford. This is all we hear of the less-well-off, though – the book is firmly about the vicar, the MP, the horsey landowner, the ladies of the manor and the owners of the village shop (now an upmarket delicatessen); it is not sullied by cleaners, cooks or bottle-washers, nor does it concern anyone young.

Soon, inevitably, someone dies, and Sheila is convinced it is not by accident. She believes that her research may have uncovered a secret that somebody wants buried, so for the rest of the book she continues to meet and interrogate the cast of characters, in the guise of having sherry with them or inviting them for cream teas in local cafes.

Despite the “otherworldliness” of this novel – are or were things ever as described here? – it’s a pleasant, undemanding read with plenty of amusing little observations, such as the shock experienced when coffee is served in a mug rather than a cup. (The Wire this is not.) The formulaic quality means that the only character with any life is the charming Sheila, so it is a bit hard to feel engaged in who committed the murder or why – it could be any one of the characters and it is really of little consequence to the reader’s emotions as to which one it turns out to be (if any). The author does not take much opportunity to convey past ways of life and compare them with the present, as she might have done given the theme of the book. And the plot, such as it is, depends too much on Sheila finding previously overlooked pieces of paper among her collections, and so on. Nevertheless, if you don’t mind setting aside reality, the friendly, confiding and chatty tone of the novel will while away a spare hour or so easily enough.

21 September 2010

I used the opportunity of my new Kindle to read this novel, which has been on my list for a while. I love legal thrillers and this one is well up there, combining a clearly expert knowledge with a crackingly fast plot on the theme of attorney-client privilege.

At the outset, a hit-and-run driver in New Jersey, USA, kills a young boy while doing excessive speeds on a residential street in his latest sports car. Vince Saldano, the driver, is a well-to-do businessman, and (portrayed as) relatively decent, hence he feels guilty for not stopping. He decides to visit a lawyer, Scott Heller, to find out whether there is any chance that he could deal with the prosecutor for a reduced sentence. He takes the unusual step of asking Scott to promise not to reveal his name while Scott is negotiating with the DA’s office. Scott is unsuccessful in negotiating a plea bargain, and to the frustration of the police, says he cannot reveal his client’s identity. Soon, Scott himself is facing court action to question the legality of his stance.

Part of the plot of this exciting novel concerns Scott’s moral dilemma, and his increasing sense of nightmare as the fallout of Vince’s strategy spirals out of control. Another part of the book focuses on the personal costs of the crime, both to the parents (particularly the mother) of the dead boy, and to Scott’s own wife and young daughter, who are unsympathetic to his position. Soon, he and his family begin to understand the emotional effects of Vince’s action and the consequences of Scott’s decision to protect the man’s identity.

There are so many twists to this novel that it is hard to review it without giving away any of its clever secrets. The final chapters, in particular, provide punch after punch and had me clicking away madly (as I did not have any actual pages to turn!). Occasionally the author provides a few educational paragraphs about some arcane aspect of law or IP addresses, but that’s fine by me. I really liked his juxtaposition of the legal and procedural after-effects of a crime, together with its terrible human cost. I don’t suppose this book will sell as well as John Grisham, but it is easily as good, if not better, and I can highly recommend it.

14 September 2010

Having recently re-discovered the charms of the local library, I was delighted the other day to spot a copy of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s third novel about lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, Ashes to Dust, and snapped it up. In this novel, Thora is hired by Markus, a 50ish well-off businessman, to allow him to gain access to the basement of his old family home in the Westmann Islands. The islands were covered in lava and ash in a volcanic eruption back in the early 1970s, and the houses there abandoned until now (2007), when they are being excavated as part of an archaeological project called the Pompeii of the North. Eventually, Thora negotiates access for Markus and accompanies him into the dusty, abandoned cellar with the eager archaeologists in tow - but they make a horribly gruesome discovery. Not only this, but in the eyes of the unsympathetically portrayed local police, Markus is the person most likely to be responsible. Thora therefore finds herself both acting for Markus and trying to find out for herself what really happened all those years ago, so she can find the real perpetrator.

In a parallel plot, a woman called Alba is found dead in her bed in her house in Reykjavik. The reader is sure the two incidents must be connected, not least because Alba and Markus grew up and went to school together on the islands. At first, Alba’s death is considered to be suicide but it rapidly transpires that the woman was murdered, in quite a horrible way. (In fact the first chapter of the novel is a gruesome description of Alba’s death from the victim’s perspective, which I could both have done without and found unnecessary for the plot – the rest of the book is mild in comparison.) Alba was a nurse, both at a plastic surgery practice and at the A&E department of the town’s hospital. She left the A&E job a few days before her death under something of a cloud, and Thora finds it difficult to find out why, although the reader knows that a rather unpleasant man called Adolf is somehow involved.

The author gradually pulls all these strings together as Thora digs into the past, visiting the islands several times with the secretary from hell, Bella, to help her – this makes a refreshing change from the rather bland Matthew, who does not feature in this book apart from in a few phone calls. The best parts of the novel are when Thora interviews all the old associates and families of Markus and Alba, in which we see the way of life and concerns of those who live in these remote parts: Thora encounters resistance, partly because Markus’s family are powerful and wealthy, in effect owning the main business of the region, so people are reluctant to say anything against any of them; and partly because nobody wants to betray old confidences or reveal nasty incidents that happened so long ago and have long since escaped the notice of the police. The descriptions of the volcanic eruption are also fascinating, as villages, farms and towns became buried and everyone and their animals had to escape the best they could. (This novel was written before, but published in English after, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull this year, which adds a level of fascination, as does the description of the Cod War from the Icelandic perspective, somewhat different from the way it was portrayed in the British press, of course.)

Readers of previous novels in this series will also know that Thora has a rather stressful personal life: she is divorced with a teenage son and young daughter. At the end of the previous novel, the son and his girlfriend had a baby, so Thora has to support them as well as struggle to keep her practice going while doing her duty by her family. She’s a charming and humorous character, and the reader is rooting for her all the way. I particularly liked her negotiation with the golf clubs. There are also lots of astute, neat touches, not least asides about attitudes to whaling and catching/eating puffins.

This having been said, I feel that at 455 pages the novel is too long and slow for its plot – and either the translation or the editing could have been a bit sharper (or even, on some occasions, grammatical). The book also cried out for a map! It is not difficult for the reader to guess the outline of what must have happened in the past to create the dilemma of the present, so the main revelation is not a surprise. Although the author creates a great atmosphere of life in Iceland, particularly on the islands, as well as providing some neat details and a nice twist in the tail, the denouement seems a long time coming. I also think that the character of Thora, in particular her domestic set-up and, in this novel, Bella, are all intriguing but under-developed. Nevertheless, this novel is superior fare: the bleak, tragic life-story of Alba in particular is extremely well told, and the subplot of Adolf and his daughter creepily telling. Yrsa Sigurdardottir is a very talented author, but I feel that she could raise her game even further by fleshing-out her regular characters more within her excellent settings and narratives.

12 September 2010

All the Colours of the TownBy Liam McIlvanneyFaber&Faber 2009. Paperback, £7.99

Gerry Conway is a political journalist for the Glasgow Tribune. Divorced with two young sons, he lives in a flat in the city centre and when he isn’t at work he’s in the pub. Aware of the general unease and insecurities of the newspaper industry, he and his colleagues are warily collaborative, eyeing each other up and wondering for how long their jobs will last. Gerry has spent much time during his career cultivating John Lyons, a politician who has risen up the ranks to become Scotland’s Minister for Justice, so he gets plenty of scoops and heads-up of stories, in return for presenting the charming but ambitious Lyons in a good light.

This cosy arrangement looks set to come to an end when a random email and phone call alert Gerry to possible criminal activity in Lyons’s past. Gerry can’t even contemplate the allegations at first, but after following up with a retired man who founded an Ulster Volunteer Force sympathisers’ magazine and group in the early 1980s, he comes to believe that Lyons was a terrorist in Belfast at that time. The pace of the novel flags at this point, as Gerry travels to Belfast to try (vainly, most of the time) to dig into the story, and we learn a lot about the ties between Scotland and Ulster at the time of the troubles, and how life for the Glasgow working class has changed in the intervening 20 years. Stimulated by a bit of a lucky coincidence, the pace picks up tremendously in the last 30 pages of the book; and indeed the concluding few pages are even slightly over-hasty in bringing together some of the many aspects of the plot.

One thing I very much liked about this book was the insider’s view of the newspaper industry and the journalists, in particular some nice vignettes about the subeditors at the start. These aspects become less significant as the book develops, and I found it hard to maintain my interest in the middle third (the Irish section), dominated as it was by men getting drunk in pubs and, occasionally, beating each other up, as well as a long part where Gerry stays at the family home of a colleague.

I don’t want to give away information that will spoil this novel for anyone, so suffice to write that the plot is a standard arc of hubris followed by a fall from grace and the eventual prospect of redemption. Although there were not many surprises in it, the story is well told, in particular Gerry’s interview with someone who appears in the prologue. Some passages of the book are quite sensitively poetic, but don’t really seem to belong to the rest of the book, perhaps because Gerry himself is not a likeable character. He’s extremely well drawn both as a man and as a very recognisable type of journalist, but he does not behave particularly well on many occasions during this story, personally or professionally, in small ways as well as larger ones. So although I admire the author’s creation, observation and writing skills, I could not warm to the character or sympathise with his situation and various predicaments.

Nevertheless, this is a very talented debut novel (the author has previously written a non-fiction book about Burns, and is currently Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand). I was drawn to read this book partly because I like crime novels about journalists, and partly because I very much enjoyed reading Laidlaw, by the author’s father William McIlvanney, many years ago. Despite my criticisms of All the Colours of the Town, I enjoyed the novel overall and can recommend it as a worthwhile read to anyone who enjoys crime fiction.

Read another review of this book at the superb blog Asylum, by John Self (far better than my meagre effort!).

10 September 2010

An Empty Death by Laura WilsonOrion, 2009. [Available in the UK in paperback, £7.99]

Having been sent a copy of Laura Wilson’s third Stratton book by her new publisher, Quercus, I thought I had better read the second, An Empty Death. This was not too onerous a proposition as I’d very much enjoyed the first in the series, Stratton’s War, set in 1940 and combining a police investigation during London’s Blitz, a tale of family life in North London, and an espionage thriller. When in the library on Saturday, I saw a copy of An Empty Death on the shelf, so took the opportunity to borrow and read it.

The novel opens in 1944, four years after the end of the first, when Londoners are truly sick of the war, with the rationing, constant worry about bombs (and, latterly, V2 rockets) and, in the case of Stratton and his wife Jenny, missing their children who have been evacuated to the countryside. The book opens with a crime, possibly, when the body of a doctor who works at the Middlesex Hospital in central north London is found dead in a bomb crater. Stratton would like to assume that the man died during a raid (what passed then for "naturally"), but the pathologist, Dr Byrne, is suspicious and his post-mortem rapidly reveals that the man’s head injuries were from a brick wielded by a human hand. A murder enquiry is opened in which Stratton and his colleagues have to question nurses, doctors and other harried medical staff at the hospital, who at the same time are horrendously overworked with treating the casualties of wartime London as well as all the usual afflictions of patients. The author is particularly strong at conveying this atmosphere, depicting professionals working under extreme pressure, struggling to stay awake after nights in bomb shelters or worse, yet, in the style of the times, rarely mentioning how they feel or verging on “cracking up”, though it's hard to see how on Earth they all kept going under such circumstances.

Another strength of this novel is the depiction of the family life of Ted and Jenny Stratton in Tottenham, together with Jenny’s sisters Doris and Lilian and their husbands, and the immediate neighbourhood. The atmosphere of the times just seems to be perfectly encapsulated. Jenny is missing her children, Monica and Pete, and is somewhat insecure about the country estate where they are staying, which is far grander than anything she or her husband can offer their offspring. She’s a warm and sensible woman, however, and spends most of her days working in a local ‘rest house’, and her evenings cooking and looking after her husband. Near the start of the book, a bomb falls on a nearby street, and Stratton is involved in digging out the victims. One of them, Mrs Ingram, is alive but shaken. Her husband is away serving, so Doris invites her to stay in her spare bedroom until he can be located and come to collect her, setting in motion a dramatic series of events.

The reader knows more about the murder case than Stratton, just, because we know that one of the doctors at the hospital is an imposter. The story of how “Dr Dacre” came into being is cleverly told, with the lack of electronic record keeping, as well as the chaos of a country at war, contributing to his ability to evade capture for so long.

Laura Wilson is a very good storyteller indeed; there are innumerable little touches that I have no space to mention here if this review is to be readable, that add up to a rounded and satisfying whole. I enjoyed this novel as much, or perhaps even more than, Stratton’s War. The earlier novel focused on events that could only have taken place in the context of the war, whereas An Empty Death is a timeless mystery that is given added interest and excitement by taking place during such unusual times. I am not usually a fan of historical novels, nor of books set in World War Two, but the apparent authenticity of the many domestic, professional and general details in this novel, as well as its triple plot, soon had me absorbed. The characters seem so genuine: so often when one reads a contemporary novel set in the past, the characters seem to act knowingly about the future, or to have attitudes that anticipate the modern era. There is none of that here, the author simply presents her characters as of their times, which is very effective.

Naturally I am not going to provide any spoilers, but the novel is highly satisfactory as a crime story, apart from one unusually clunky section sowing the seed of a connection between Dr Dacre and Mrs Ingram. This is the only wobble I experienced in a really rewarding novel. There is a tragic event near the end which I think was inevitable in order for the series to have momentum in the future, and I’m glad the author did not flinch from it. I can’t wait to read the next in this excellent series - not least because on the basis of the first two titles, each book is going to be very different in theme from the others.

09 September 2010

This novel is an extremely addictive debut, which deservedly won the CWA debut dagger this year. The publisher very kindly contacted me to offer a copy, and though books about babies in danger are definitely not my cup of tea, I accepted the generous offer -- and I am glad I did.

The novel is a real page-turner, being mainly the story of Rose, a woman who is on trial for setting a house on fire with a baby and his mother inside it. The novel explores Rose’s past via her diary, exposing a history of neglect by her parents and parent-figures for a variety of reasons. As a young adult, Rose ends up working in various menial jobs in a seaside hotel, where she meets Jason, the barman, and falls for him. She and Jason begin to live together, fulfilling Rose’s fantasy of a happy relationship. The reality, though, is that Jason is still in love with his young ex-wife Emma, and isn’t that interested in Rose. The author builds up the suspense within this eternal triangle, and cleverly portrays emotions and events spiralling out of control.

The contemporary part of the novel centres around Cate, a newly qualified prison probation officer. She has to decide whether or not Rose deserves parole when her case comes up in the next few weeks. Cate has a tough time of it, partly as a newly-single parent whose young daughter Amelia is in child care while her mother works, and partly because of the prison culture, which consists of (mainly) deeply sexist, lazy and overweight men (there is one butch female guard), together with devious prisoners who are pretty good at playing the system and hoodwinking their keepers.

There is plenty of suspense and melodrama in this novel; even though the main plot twist is very easy to anticipate, it is delivered with high impact. I won’t say more in my review as I do not want to provide any spoilers, but the subsidiary twist is not convincing to me, given what we know of the principal characters.

As a debut novel, this is a remarkably assured and well-written book. It only takes an hour or two to read, and is well-worth the effort. The book is not without its flaws, unfortunately, and at several points during Rose’s back-story I was hardly able to suspend my disbelief even while my emotions were engaged in her sad yet creepy tale. The other story, about Cate, peters out towards the end which is quite disappointing, as the prison scenes, from the perspectives of the inmates and the administration, are perhaps the strongest part of the book (the author worked in the probation service), and Cate is an intriguing character. The novel is clearly by a very talented author, and despite the occasional lapses from believability, it is certainly a novel well worth reading as an exploration of the nastier aspects of human nature and the bleaker end of the genre.

Legend Press is an independent book publisher, and it’s great for them as well as the author that the novel has won the CWA debut dagger. I hope that it does very well.

08 September 2010

This is how The Women’s Club is described on the cover and on Amazon : “When Jack Hale invested in Celia's advertising agency, it was not because he had faith in her abilities - it was because she's his daughter. But, suddenly, she's an inexplicable success. When he takes her out to dinner to celebrate, they witness a daring murder, committed in full public view. There's no way the killer could have escaped without a precisely orchestrated series of improbable events ...or were they just very, very lucky? Is it really possible that there is a female conspiracy, dedicated to ridding the world of evil - or even just inconvenient - men? Jack must risk everything to uncover the truth about The Women's Club.”

This novel describes these, and subsequent events in New York City. Jack is a widower who is guilty about his wife’s death – he’s been a workaholic all his life and did not pay her much attention, though he gave her lots of money. Now he’s retired he is bored, rich and wants to know his daughter better. The daughter has mixed attitudes to her father. After the two of them witness the murder described in the blurb above, Jack becomes romantically interested in Anne, the police officer investigating the crime.

Much of the novel describes various women who are in unsatisfactory relationships with, or are otherwise treated meanly by, men. These men begin to die. Who is behind this? And so on.

I did not enjoy this novel at all. It’s bland, poorly written, clunky and 100 per cent predictable. Events are described superficially with no attempt at realistic detail. On the positive side, it is very easy to read and has an unflagging pace. Even so, I have to admit I could not bear to continue with it after reading the first third or so – I skimmed the rest of the book, which was more of the same, and the ending turned out exactly as I’d thought.

I was mildly curious about the authors as I had not heard of them before; there is no mention of the novel at the "MaxCrime" section of the publisher's website. I soon discovered that the authors are a couple, the female half of which writes romantic fiction and “erotica” (eg Black Lace novels) under the name of Madeline Moore . There is an interview with her here, in which she describes writing this book, among other things.

I read a publisher's copy of this novel, kindly given to me by Karen of Euro Crime.

06 September 2010

I very much enjoyed reading this classic crime novel. Although this is 21st in a series, anyone coming to it for the first time would enjoy this book, which is praise indeed, for the balance of satisfying regular readers while attracting new ones is a hard one to achieve.

Kinsey Milllhone, who lives in a place where time is slower than it is in reality, is now in 1988, living in Santa Teresa, California (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara). She is an independently minded PI, who makes a reasonable living providing evidence in cases such as divorce, corporate hiring, and the like. Occasionally, something comes her way that is slightly offbeat, and the baseline of her regular work allows her to spend time getting to the bottom of these unusual investigations.

Michael Stone is a somewhat inadequate, but nice, man who comes to see Kinsey because he has suddenly remembered an incident from his childhood. When he was six, he was playing in “the woods” and met two men burying something. When in his adult persona he encounters one of the men, he has a flashback and, putting two and two together, thinks that what he has remembered is a burial. At exactly that time in 1967, a four-year-old girl was kidnapped and, despite the desperate parents paying a ransom, she was never returned or found. Michael thinks that what he remembers is meeting two men who were burying the girl’s body.

After interrogating him, Kinsey agrees to spend a day (all that Michael can afford) investigating the 21-year-old case. She soon zeroes in on the location with Michael’s corroboration, and calls in the police. They investigate, but what they find is not the body of a girl.

The rest of the book is a series of alternating chapters that are sometimes set in the mid-1960s, when the kidnap happened, and sometimes set in 1988, Kinsey’s present. I very much enjoyed the 1960s segments, particularly the chapters told from the point of view of Deborah Urunth, a conventional suburban US housewife who is subjected to the full force of the “summer of love” in both gently humorous and real-world senses.

Kinsey gradually uncovers the events of the past, intrigued by Michael’s situation and half, but not entirely, convinced by those who tell her that he’s a time-waster and a fantasist who has irrevocably damaged his own family. At the same time, she receives some information about her own estranged relations, and cannot help experiencing parallels between her own case and that of Michael’s. Kinsey is an attractive, highly independent woman who likes being alone; she’s easy to identify with and I think one of the most enduringly reliable female protagonists in crime fiction.

Sue Grafton has written a very good crime novel with a solid plot and plenty of pace and observation. She really delivers, not taking the easy route of appealing to her audience who have read her previous 20 books (as I have), but rather adopting a fresh approach and creating a story of real human interest in addition to the satisfying detection plot. The ending is perhaps a little hasty with a question or two not properly resolved (quite glaringly in one case), but the juxtaposition of past memories and present characters, over the 20-year period that the novel covers, as well as Kinsey’s own continuing story, is very well done. I highly recommend this book, whether or not you have read any of the previous Kinsey Millhone novels.

02 September 2010

Midnight CabBy James W. Nichol (Canongate 2005, first published in Canada 2002).

Walker Deveraux is a nineteen-year old man, about to leave his mother, father and six sisters and their house in the small town of Big River, Thunder Bay for an independent life in the big city – Toronto. Walker hasn’t told his parents of his true intention, however, which is to try to find his biological parents.

Walker’s first memory is from when he was three years old. He recalls his mother bending down to him and telling him to hold on to a fence, and not let go. She vanished. Some time later, a passing motorist discovered the boy, all alone, gripping the fence by the side of the road. After living in many foster homes, the Canadian authorities eventually found a family to adopt him, whom Walker has grown to love. But he is desperate to find his birth parents, and to learn why he was abandoned. After calling in to the local social services department, where he’s given his file which contains only the most meagre information, he arrives in Toronto. He finds a small room to rent and starts looking for a job. After some time of fruitless searching, Walker stumbles across a chaotic taxi firm, and inveigles his way to being taken on as a driver on the midnight shift.

Walker has a couple of thin clues to go on, and doggedly follows up every lead he can think of, usually with the help of Krista, a colleague at work. Soon, though, he realises that he’s being followed, by someone who seems very keen to stop him in his search.

As well as Walker’s story, the novel tells the tale of a boy called Bobby in flashback. It is slowly revealed that Bobby is not a “normal” boy – in fact, he is “different” in a creepy and awful way, wrapped up in a perverse relationship with his remote-seeming father. How Bobby’s story is relevant to Walker’s past is a big part of the mystery in this novel. The author is very good at spinning out the tension; there’s a jolt of surprise about 200 pages in, after which it becomes clearer to us, if not to Walker, what must have happened. Even so, there are still surprises to come as the details of the past gradually emerge in full.

Midnight Cab is a very attractive novel. The central story of Walker and his seemingly hopeless quest is presented with sensitivity yet not sentimentality. Walker’s evolving relationship with Krista is also unusual and poignant. Although I am not at all keen on “mind of the killer” chapters in novels, I have to say that in this case it is very well done, in a convincing way. Although there is quite a bit of revolting stuff, none of it is gratuitous. And the central mystery, as Walker gradually uncovers layer after layer of his past, thinking he’s discovered something and then finding out that he hasn’t and has to start again, is very compelling.

01 September 2010

This is the story of several women - or is it? The novel opens with an un-named woman about to throw herself off a bridge in despair. We then flash back to several stories told in alternating chapters or segments – one story is about a young girl of about eight years old who is abandoned by her father at a children’s home. The home is awful, more reminiscent of a Victorian workhouse than an institution of this or even last century. Another is about Nina, who is happily married to Mick, an artist. They adore each other and their teenage daughter Josie, though Josie spends much of her time on Afterlife, a social networking website as well as going on cosy shopping trips with her mum. Nina, when not in her "perfect wife or mother" role, is exceptionally nervous and paranoid - it seems due to some previous, hinted-at, traumatic experience. For this reason she is always going to pieces when apparently trivial events occur, such as when she receives an old hair slide in the post. I kept mentally telling her to get a grip and tell someone. A third story is about a young woman who arrives at a boarding school as the new staff assistant. There seem to be many under-the-surface passions heaving away between the girls and the teachers, particularly Adam, a young man from Australia who seems to have hidden motives for being at the school as well as being involved, possibly, with one of the students.

It seems clear that these stories are related, and indeed connections become explicit about half-way through the book. Until then, the novel seems quite slow-paced, mainly due to its narrative style of dealing with each woman’s (or girl's) narrow perspective and confusion, so bigger-picture clues (such as time and place, or in the case of the children's home, adult assessment of what is going on) can be withheld from the reader. I have to admit I found the novel rather melodramatic and Nina, in particular, seems unnecessarily wimpy and secretive to her own detriment and that of her relationships. The last section, when the true motive of some of the characters is revealed, and the identities of the women become explicit, is by far the best, as action and therefore pace, picks up. The tension is a bit lessened by the behaviour of some of the characters, though, for example Nina’s inexplicable inability to contact someone she knows can help her at a crucial plot point, and the whole, crazy (illogical, cruel and unnecessary) “jumping off the bridge” episode.

I don’t think this novel is really a crime story, it’s more of a combination of "fiction as recommended by women's magazines", saga and “misery memoir” in fictional form. I am not a fan of any of these genres, and am completely allergic to women's magazines, so I am probably not the best person to assess the novel. The theme of danger to young people on the internet that is highlighted in the author’s preface as her main motivation to write the book seems to me both well-known among teenagers these days, and to be a lesser evil by far than some of the other extremely nasty things that turn out to have been going on when all, finally, is revealed.

I thank Karen of Euro Crime, and the publisher, for my copy of this novel.

29 August 2010

American Visa by Juan de RecacoecheaTranslated by Adrian Althoff. Publisher, Akashic Books, 2007 (first published in Spanish, 1994).

A taxi grinds to a halt in the middle of crammed street parties and demonstrations in downtown La Paz, Bolivia, and Mario Alvarez disembarks. Alvarez is searching for somewhere cheap to stay while he applies for a US visa so he can visit his son, who is living and working in Florida. After several failed attempts to find anywhere with a vacancy, he discovers a cheap-seeming dive called the Hotel California. It was at this point that I realised that I was in all likelihood reading one of those books in which the protagonist never achieves his goal.

Whether or not Alvarez does get to his destination is not for me to reveal here, but it is certainly true that the book is almost wholly about his sojourn in the steep up-and-down streets of La Paz, experiencing many different aspects of life and meeting the widest range of people imaginable. The author plays with many themes in this hectic book – the entire process of trying to obtain a visa, with the queues, bureaucracy and cheats that desperate people who will do anything to get a ticket being but the kicking-off point for Alvarez’s increasingly bizarre, Kafka-esque journey of discovery and self-discovery.

Hotel California itself provides a mix of characters all too eager to advise our somewhat hopelessly naive high-school teacher protagonist. He’s inevitably very short of money, as is everyone – his two main companions among his fellow-guests exist by selling off a personal archive of books one-by-one, and being an enthusiastic lap-dancer/prostitute.

American Visa is certainly not a novel for the faint-hearted, as the dives and details of life in this impoverished, land-locked country are dissected in minute detail, against a background of political comment against the Spanish colonialists, the British landowners, the silver and tin mine-owners and the government who nationalised everything and consigned the people to poverty rather than their hoped-for freedom. The country is bankrupt, as are many of the people and institutions we encounter in the book.

If you like the kind of book that is, in effect, a journey round a series of set-piece characters and situations, there is much to like here. I was particularly fond of the section in a bookshop, featuring a hilarious book-reading by a pretentious poetess. Like other books I have recently read from South and Central America, the novel is extremely sexist. The women characters are almost all extremely keen on sex, usually with Alvarez, which gets a bit tedious. Alvarez’s cherished goal of working in an IHOP is, in itself, surreally amusing. However, there are so many satirical and cynical passages that it all gets a bit lost in the mix.

American Visa isn’t a conventional crime story by any means; in fact the “crime” does not happen until about page 200 of the 250-page novel. Although I could see much to admire in it, I am not the biggest fan in the world of existentialist noir, of which this book is almost a perfect type-example. I like journeys to arrive somewhere real and to have more of a focused plot. Even so, it is fascinating to read a book from the Bolivian perspective.

According to the informative afterword to the novel by Ilan Stavans, which tells of how the book came to be translated, it was written as a direct reaction against the then-fashionable magical realism of the time (epitomised by One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel I struggled with years ago but could not finish). Stavans writes of the author: “Instead, he prefers the dirty urban landscape of La Paz, where the only thing magical is to make ends meet.”

The Brooklyn Rail has an interview with the author and the translator about American Visa and other matters (the post has the inevitable title of Bolivian Noir). The opening part of the novel is excerpted at the publisher's website.

28 August 2010

I recently read a very positive review of the latest in the series of books about Jack Yu, a Chinese police detective in New York, so I thought I would try the first one, Chinatown Beat. In this novel, Yu is stationed in Chinatown, almost the only cop there to speak the language or understand the culture. He has to deal with racism (usually unspoken) from his colleagues in addition to the standard (in the crime fiction genre) police politics, as well as a lack of trust from his old friends from the neighbourhoods in which he grew up, for joining the law-enforcement establishment.

Both these aspects of the novel are successfully and poignantly conveyed, framed as they are by the recent death of Yu’s father, which means that the son has to clear out his father’s cheap apartment and reflect on his childhood and difficult adult relationship with him.The crime part of the plot also starts well, set amongst the recent immigrants to the USA who have to contend not only with the struggle to survive and settle in an alien land, but with their own community in Chinatown, which is rigidly controlled by the heads of Tongs – the legal front for what were the Triads. This dilemma is shown in the persona of Johnny Wong, who has recently graduated from menial work to driving a taxi. One of his regular clients is Uncle Four, a senior figure in the Chinese community, and his young companion, the beautiful but desperate Mona.

In this milieu, a very young girl is attacked by a rapist while being escorted home from school by her grandmother. Jack Yu is assigned the case, but quickly realises that the girl is not the first victim. The fact that the perpetrator is an apparently well-dressed Chinese man creates conflicts of interest within the immigrant community hierarchies and their relationship with the police and indeed within the police themselves as to how to handle the case.

The strongest parts of this book are the depictions of the various closed communities – the mores and rules by which people live and how the men at the top keep control and see off their eager rivals. Jack Yu, too, is an interesting character, particularly when he encounters a female human-rights lawyer who has her own prejudices about the police.

The story of Mona is very poignant while she is living in New York, and in fact takes over the novel to the detriment of the crime plot, which becomes rather perfunctory. Although this book is a bit raw in places, it is an impressive debut, leaving Jack Yu in an interesting place at the end. I think the soap opera aspects (the flight of Mona) that dominated the last part of the novel are not so successful, and some of the sections about Chinese immigrant life could have been shorter and just as effective. I might well try a future novel in the series in the hope that it focuses more on a crime plot and Yu’s issues with his personal life and police politics.

Author website, including short synopses of this and other novels in the series.

27 August 2010

The Havana Quartet, of which this novel is the first, is a highly regarded contribution to the crime-fiction genre. The story is at first straightforward: a young man is found murdered in the woods outside the town of Havana, a well-known night-time pick-up haunt for homosexuals and others outside the mainstream who are unloved by the government. The man, a “carnivalesque creature”, is wearing a red dress and is made up like a woman. He’s been killed by being strangled by a red scarf which is still tightly wrapped round his neck. Oddly, he seems to have put up no resistance to his murder.

The policeman who is given the case is Inspector Mario Conde, whose father was a Count in the old regime of Cuba but who now lives in relative poverty alongside almost all other citizens of this anomalous island. His closest companion is an old schoolfriend Carlos, a.k.a. “Skinny”, nowadays an obese man who is wheelchair-bound after his service in the army’s Angolan campaign. The two men cope together with the extreme heat and the trials and tribulations of living in a country where there isn’t much of anything and where the laws are oppressive.

The murder victim is called Alexis Arayan, the son of well-to-do parents. His mother is devastated, and his father, a UN ambassador, is called back from his current overseas mission. Conde soon finds out that Alexis was not living at home but with a playwright called Alberto Marques, at first presented as a decadent, slug-like person who Conde suspects had influenced the young man into a world of shady transsexuals and drug-induced excess. Conde repeatedly refers to himself as a red-blooded male, and is revolted by the concept of homosexuality, transvestism and all other aberrations of human nature, as he sees them. Marques is a patient man, and almost despite himself, Conde finds himself willing to learn about these practices in order to find out more about the murder victim and how he might have died. Part of the novel is about Conde’s journey of discovery towards a more enlightened perspective rather than his instinctive revulsion of “deviants”. When he was a young man he wanted to be a writer. He wrote a short story but while it was in the press at a magazine, the publication was shut down by the government for being anti-Communist. Conde never wrote again, instead becoming a policeman. Now, as he becomes more open-minded under Marques’s guidance, his muse returns to him – all highly allegorical of the country itself. The story of Marques and Conde is heavily influenced by the Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera, for many years banned in Cuba, and whose play Electra Garrigo, based on the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and his family, forms an integral part of the plot (the dead man’s red dress was worn in the play). Padura himself is an advocate of Pinera’s work.

Conde spends most of the novel distracted into these avenues, allowing himself to attend a transvestite’s party and picking up a young woman there. In the meantime, his professional and focused sergeant pursues a more conventional approach to investigating the crime, asking witnesses and suspects pertinent questions and so on. Conde does return to the case near the end, and does not take long to nail it down.

I have to say I didn’t like this book much because of its relentless sexism, objectifying all young females. Any woman under the age of 60 (mothers and old servants are tolerated so long as they just cook and keep out of the way) is treated with contempt by the male characters, including in Conde’s fictional work, although I assume that his short story is an allegory with the woman character representing the political repression meted out to the populace.

Although I am no prude so did not mind the very up-front, often very funny, dialogue, I really hated the constant and explicit male-wish-fulfilment sexual aspects. I quite liked all the literary and philosophical digressions, indeed without them the crime would have been solved very quickly and there wouldn’t have been much of a book. I also liked the laconic humour and political manoeuvrings of the police station and force, though there was not enough of this for my taste. The author is interested in doing more than just tell the story of a crime, though, and I liked the many implicit political and social points he is making, and appreciated the literary depth of the book. I am not so sure I could tolerate reading any more of the series. It was all a bit intense and sexist for me, even though I can understand the popularity and plaudits that the series has attracted, on the basis of this first outing.